Charles Bukowski Quotes

This is part of the involuntary bargain we make with the world just by being alive. We get to experiences the splendor of nature, the beauty of art, the balm of love and the sheer joy of existence, always with the knowledge that illness, injury, natural disaster, or pure evil can end it in an instant for ourselves or someone we love.

What can we do about God, who makes and then breaks every god-forsaken, beautiful day?

Decay and disease are often beautiful, like the pearly tear of the shellfish and the hectic glow of consumption.

The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence. The destruction of Troy. The fall of the petals from fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence - that is beautiful.

Life and death were so unpredictable. So close to each other. We existed moment to moment, never knowing who would be the next to leave the world. I was still in it, barely, and as I looked up from the ashes, everything around me seemed so sweet and so beautiful. The trees. The stars. The moon. I was alive -- and I was glad I was.

Kneecaps only exist to get hit with claw-hammers; grace only exists to be fallen from.

Snapshots, moments, mere seconds: as fragile and beautiful and hopeless as a single butterfly, flapping on against a gathering wind.

I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.

What I've been thinking about recently is the idea of finite and fragility. Either we're acknowledging that our lives here are finite, this moment is finite, and that this whole world is fragile, or we're not, but it is really happening and that is really true.

Love is like a flower, even the most beautiful kind dies.

I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.

War is being reminded that you are completely at the mercy of death at every moment, without the illusion that you are not. Without the distractions that make life worth living.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

I'll confess it is pleasant to look at you asleep. You're quite beautiful, Clarice.

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.

Passing beauties are only the fugitive reflections of the eternal. All beauty alters and all life melts away; in short, everything passes with marvelous rapidity; beautiful Helen of Troy has become a toothless skull, then a handful of dust, then nothing.

You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.

By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.

I think, that if I touched the earth, It would crumble; It is so sad and beautiful, So tremulously like a dream.

I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.

Everyone is fragile. Everything beautiful is fragile

Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments.

There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.