Charles Bukowski Quotes

Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care... -Wintergirls

I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself.

We're tortured, a lot of us, believe me.

I think emotional and mental pain is probably worse than physical pain. I think we don't realize that I have no arms or legs but we all have disabilities of some sort, some fear, some lost, some wishes that didn't come true, things we wish would be better.

Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention.

But the division in him was a sorrow and a torment, and he became accustomed to it only as one gets used to an unhealed and frequently reopened wound.

Pain is something that's common to human life. When we ignore it, we aren't engaging in the whole reality, and the pain begins to fester.

I believe that everybody comes from pain and a certain amount of dysfunction.

A well-off plastic surgeon can suffer just as much as an Irish lad who has been abused or whatever.

I have seen things in my life that have broken me in spirit.

Nobody knows the pain I've been through.

I'm from a city where the tears never end and the pain never stops.

Sometimes a man is intensely, even passionately, attached to suffering — that is a fact.

There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain.

Loss is very painful, because any kind of loss leaves a hole in the fabric of one's existence.

There's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it.

I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?

There will be no song on our lips if there be no anguish in our hearts.

He did not know which was more painful, the waking or the sleeping. When he slept, he dreamed: dark disturbing dreams of blood and broken promises. When he woke, there was nothing to do but think, and his waking thoughts were worse than nightmares.

The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts

Horrible experiences lead us to wonder whether the person who experiences them might not be something horrible.

I could never hurt him enough to make his betrayal stop hurting. And it hurts, in every part of my body.

I looked at my hand resting on the shelf of the prop cabinet, thinking of the scars that were there whether anyone could see them or not.

Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.

Goddamn, sometimes it hurt to be free.