Charles Bukowski Quotes

When I've had a meltdown, people will say to me, "Well, you failed to keep your sense of humor."

The negative effects of combat were nightmares, and I'd get jumpy around certain noises and stuff, but you'd have that after a car accident or a bad divorce. Life's filled with trauma. You don't need to go to war to find it; it's going to find you. We all deal with it, and the effects go away after awhile. At least they did for me.

Stress is never a given. There are people who get divorced amicably. There are people who pack up and move with no emotional toll. There is no stressor 'out there' in the world. We experience stress - or we don't - depending on what we believe.

I think there are spirits who are just too frail for the events life throws at them. Where do these people hide, and how do they survive?

The shock of any trauma, I think changes your life. It's more acute in the beginning and after a little time you settle back to what you were. However it leaves an indelible mark on your psyche.

I've been one of those people that hold on to a little bit more stress than others. People take certain situations a little bit differently.

If you're out there and things are going badly, are you going to cry or break down?

I want my characters to really overuse their coping mechanisms to the point where they break down within 300 pages.

I think I'm lucky in that I can park things. I don't dwell. I've got a selective memory. I only remember the good things. I don't know what a psychologist or a psychiatrist would say about that.

I had no idea there was such a thin line between sanity and insanity. I got pushed right to the edge by tragedy in my life, and I couldn't stand up; I couldn't recover.

I have lived one step away from losing my mind for years. I am quick and accurate in spotting unstable streaks in others.

Why are you breaking down, incidentally? I mean if you’re able to go into a collapse with all your might, why can’t you use the same energy to stay well and busy?

And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential — I know it.

I know people with PTSD, and it's very real and very hard. But it doesn't change your core character.

The portrayal of post-traumatic stress disorder and things like that felt really big and important.

Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation, seemed merely a temporary halt on my steady descent through layer after layer of depression, like an elevator stopping for a moment on the way down to the basement.

We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this--through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication, we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime.

Usually right when I'm feeling it, right when it's happening, I always find I need to be in some sort of survival mode or mature mom mode, so it always seems to come later that I have the breakdown.

Both hurting and happiness make me feel more alive, but as I get older it seems that hurting's the low hanging fruit. So I pick it.

It's kind of a little fly-on-the-wall look at these people trying to stay sane.

The strain of constant adaptation to so many fearful events and discoveries is already too much to bear with sanity; one has to keep pretending to slip successfully into the new mould; a time will come when the tailored and camouflaged mind breaks beneath the burden; the stick insect in our brains no longer cares to resemble a twig on the same habitual human tree in the mere hope that it may survive extinction.

Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.

What they don't know is that I went over the edge years ago, and lived to tell the tale.

Men under stress are fools, and fool themselves.

He wanted to talk to them, if he could, to discover whether they had truths about life which he had never heard before. Here is what he hoped new truths might do for him: enable him to laugh at his troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the Midland County General Hospital, which was for lunatics.