Charles Bukowski Quotes

To heal our wounds, we need courage to face them.

I'm a survivor. But I'm also victim, too. Surviving has the connotation that you've been through it, you lived through it and that's wonderful - but a victim is what I was. "Survivor" is the more healing way to look at it.

Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.

We're not broken, just bent, and we can learn to love again.

We thought the hard part was over—but we were wrong. Living is the hardest part. Figuring out how to live your life when you’re all busted up inside and out—there is nothing harder.

There's a lot of wounded people out there who don't believe that there's any way they'll ever be healed from those wounds.

No matter what happens or how difficult things become, you will eventually feel better.

Vulnerability pushed, I pushed back. I lost the fight, but probably won my life back.

All of us heal in time. The strongest are born again. We only keep the scars we choose to keep.

What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?

The bruise on the heart which at first feels incredibly tender to the slightest touch eventually turns all the shades of the rainbow and stops aching. We forget about it. We even forget we have hearts until the next time. And then we wonder how we ever could have forgotten. We think this one is better, because, in fact, we cannot fully remember the time before.

It's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief . . . lessens. It may not go away completely, but after a while it's not so overwhelming.

and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended

Man must be able to recover, to win out, triumph over adversity. And I don't mean just the little adversity like paying his room rent or something. But those deep, deep human adversities because something he has faith in has turned to ashes. Where someone he loves turns out to be just another joke. You get to the point of suicide. But you can bounce back - they can't completely destroy you.

For people like me, who have blocked out a chunk of their past, you wonder - if you open that door, if you walk into that room of your memories, what will happen? Will it destroy you or will it make you stronger?

I've been on the floor and I've been heartbroken. I didn't know how I was going to stand up. But I just gave it time.

Real pain hurts so bad. When you've gone through something and you've overcome it, you're able to heal other people.

I found strength in what hurt me. And in my family - that's my strength as well. I'm truly grateful to be hurt as many times as I have, because I'm happy!

If something hurtful enters your body, you create something beautiful to protect yourself from it. That's my philosophy.

Injuries make you stronger.

I get why we don't want to be in pain, but there's something very essential about what happens when we're in pain and some of the growth that can come from it if we stare at it straight in the face.

When you've been touched by sadness and grief, it makes you vulnerable. And because I am vulnerable, I try to be positive. And when I say 'try,' I really do mean try, because it's an effort.

They always say, 'Time heals.' But it really doesn't. You just get used to it. I live life with the mentality of 'OK, I lost the only thing that has ever been important to me.' So going forward, anything bad that happens can't be nearly as bad as what happened before.

Things get better--hurt less--over time. If you let them.

Pain is a part of being alive, and we need to learn that. Pain does not last forever, nor is it necessarily unbeatable, and we need to be taught that.