Charles Bukowski Quotes

The only real things in life is the unexpected things. Everything else is just an illusion.

If it doesn't matter in five years, it doesn't matter.

Come morning I found the day as I have found every other day--without relief or explanation.

Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.

Things That Don't Matter When You've Lived the Same Day Six Times and Died on at Least Two of Them: Lunch meats and their relative coolness.

Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.

It's all the same, only the names will change, everyday it seems we're wasting away. Another place, where the faces are so cold, I'd drive all night just to get back home.

Finally, the truth. Lying with his face pressed into the dusty carpet of the office where he had once thought he was learning the secrets of victory, Harry understood at last that he was not supposed to survive.

The U.S. that I had imagined was nowhere near as crazy and as incredibly damaging and brutal and indifferent as the U.S. that we're currently living in. I thought I was being transgressive, apocalyptic, an out-there person. And then reality lapped me, it just lapped me.

Once, this had been the life I’d wanted. Even chosen. Now, though, I couldn’t believe that there had been a time when this kind of monotony and silence, this most narrow of existences, had been preferable. Then again, once, I’d never known anything else.

I learned life were no dream I learned truth deceived Man is not God Life is a century Death an instant

We’d met at a carefree time, a moment full of promise, in its place now were the harsh lessons of the real world.

You don't know what's coming for you in life, and you don't know what's around the corner. When you're in a great deal of pain, you're only imagining your world the way it is.

Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.

A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.

Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually .

... 'I've been doing everything for an awfully long time, and I've seen and lived as hard as I could, and it's been unbelievable, I tell you, unbelievable. But now I have the feeling everything's gliding away from me, and I don't remember, and I don't care, and yet now is right when I need it!'. [pp. 84-85]

The pleasures that once were heaven look silly at sixty-seven.

Sometimes I feel like the Tom Hanks character in Big. But my life is not a movie. I never have to go back to Coney Island to find the fortune-teller machine so I have to grow up again.

O World, try to deceive someone else. Are you trying to tempt me or attract me? No way! I divorce you irrevocably. Your time is short and you are insignificant. Alas! The provision is little, the journey is long and the way is lonely.

Vain are the thousand creeds That move men's hearts, unutterably vain; Worthless as withered weeds, Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.

Most of these who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war.

There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all. And his important meeting was not important, not in the slightest.

There comes a point when you have to realize that the sum of all your blood, sweat, and tears will ultimately amount to zero.