Charles Bukowski Quotes

Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound; I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground; whisk the lamps away.

Concealing an illness is like keeping a beach ball under water.

Depression is internal. The upswings and downswings have pretty much nothing to do with what's going on in the external world. It's not like something sad happens to you and then you feel sad. Good things happen, but you feel sad anyway.

Half the ills we heard within our hearts are ills because we hoard them.

Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.

Honestly, the pains of humanity have been draining me.

...it is better to have a mouthful of poison than a secret of the heart.

I didn't trot my pain out to show around. I kept it better hidden than anyone. I did.

There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.

A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.

Men take their misfortunes to heart and keep them there.

I couldn't tell her. I couldn't tell anyone. As long as I didn't say it aloud, it wasn't real.

Secrets of the heart. We swallow hard against them every day, forcing them deep inside us. There they sit, growing heavier, festering. Given enough time, they cannot help but crush the heart that holds them.

Resentment or grudges do no harm to the person against whom you hold these feelings but every day and every night of your life, they are eating at you.

When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.

I'll burn myself, or I'll cut myself. For a burn or a cut might be shown, might be nursed, might scar or heal, would be a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway be there, on the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within. Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem: I won't be doing it like some hysterical girl. I won't be hoping she'll come catch me at it. It won't be like lying on the sitting-room floor. I'll be doing it for myself, as a secret.

I inscribe three lines, hush hush hush, into my skin. Ghosts trickle out.

Sometimes seeming happy can be self-destructive even when you're sane.

The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.

The only way I can describe the extent of my anxiety is to say that I felt as if I were pregnant with a rock.

You can hold a secret, hold it so far in that it drives nearly every thought and every move you make- your very heartbeat, almost.

Self-loathing is the silent hemorrhaging of the soul. You don't feel or see the life force fleeing until it's not longer there, and then, of course, it's too late.

I can't stop thinking about cutting myself up. Visual bruises can be covered with make-up, but down to the core, I'm all bruises.

Geez, if I could get through to you, kiddo, that depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Reduction, see? Of all feeling. People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.

Lately I’d begun carrying pain amulets in my bag, like some people have breath mints.