Charles Bukowski Quotes

Not everything was lost in the flow of time

Oh, I wish I was young again when everything seemed so wonderful!

some things are better off back in the past. Where they belong.

Through this feeling of helplessness suddenly burst a piercing nostalgia for the lost world of childhood. The way it came right up against the heart, that world, and against the face. No indoors or outdoors, only everything touching us, and the grown-ups lumbering past overhead like constellations.

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.

Praise they that will times past, I joy to see My selfe now live: this age best pleaseth mee.

We go through life so fast and we never really get to enjoy moments. It seems like they go past us...Tonight I just wanted to take a minute, a moment and soak it in and be a kid from Robbins Illinois and be a kid from Marquette University.

I remember things being more clearer, at one time things were more real.

Have you ever heard one civilized person whose opinion you respect, at any time, anywhere, in any civilized country anywhere, say the good new days?

I think it's important for people to realize that we were all young, all naive, and also we had lived in a time that had magic.

Every previous era looks innocent.

Honestly, I spend very little time thinking about past events, and I certainly don't have them ranked in any way. I look back and think that I have done a lot of good work over the years, but I am much more excited about what the future holds.

"So we'd get in a horse and buggy and we would go and park under a tree and we'd read poetry to each other." And my grandfather told me all the stories. I mean, their way of communicating... They didn't have telephones, either, so they communicated with the written word. And I really... That's how old [Bill] Clinton has become to me [speaking of how he met Hillary Clinton].

Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists-just as grownups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their hearts.

Each generation supposes that the world was simpler for the one before it.

I saw The Sound of Music again recently, and I loved it. Probably it's a more valuable film now than when it first came out, because some of the things it stood for have already disappeared. There's a kind of naive loveliness about it, and love goes by so fast ... love and music and happiness and family, that's what it's all about. I believe in these things. It would be awful not to, wouldn't it?

I love the nostalgic myself. I hope we never lose some of the things of the past.

Let me hold on to this the way it was, before I knew anything else.

Each day comes to me with both hands full of possibilities.

Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.

Where were we?" she said. "Getting credit," I said. "What about it?" "Well, it's nice to get credit." The spokes of her rear wheel spun behind the curtain of her long skirt. She looked like a photograph from a hundred years ago. She turned her wide eyes on me. "Is it?" she said.

Past and to come, seems best; things present, worse.

Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.

If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.