Charles Bukowski Quotes

Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.

I always think the most romantic books or films are the ones where the romance doesn't happen, because it makes your heart ache so much watching it.

She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.

I'll bet she's beautiful, that girl he talks about, and she's got everything that I have to live without... He's the reason for the teardrops on my guitar, the only one who's got enough of me to break my heart. He's the song in the car I keep singing; don't know why I do.

I closed my eyes, thinking, Let me love you, Hardy, just let me.

The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have.

All we really want in life is to connect to other human beings, and when you desperately want to connect physically to one specific human being and you can't? That's something I find compelling.

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.

There is a phrase in French, which means 'to miss.' To pass by. To not be able to stop. You love someone and someone loves you, but it just can't work for different reasons.

I never got the opportunity to be romantic or feel romantic with anyone.

I like to write about love and love lost because I feel like there are so many different subcategories of emotions that you can possibly delve into.

I am an incurable romantic. I am even in love with the idea of being in love, and hence, I write a lot of love songs.

I've never been in love. I've dreamt of it day and night, but my heart is like a fine piano no one can play because the key is lost.

What if the person you were meant to be with could never be yours?

He thinks about her, at this moment, in her house, a few thin walls away, packing her life into boxes and bags and he wonders what memories she is rediscovering, what thoughts are catching in her mouth like the dust blown from unused textbooks. He wonders if she has buried any traces of herself under her floorboards. He wonders what those traces would be if she had. And he wonders again why he thinks about her so much when he knows so little to think about.

She was sleeping in a quiet bedroom beside her brother, separated only by glass and sand from the young man she loved, a young man who loved her back

Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.

Part of me aches at the thought of her being so close yet so untouchable.

I fell in love with her when we were together, then fell deeper in love with her in the years we were apart.

I have come to realize that destiny can hurt a person as much as it can bless them, and I find myself wondering why--out of all the people in all the world I could ever have loved--I had to fall in love with someone who was taken away from me.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

I’ve been thinking I’d like to be Daisy; I’d like to have someone like Gatsby stare at my house for whole years and never stop dreaming of me