Charles Bukowski Quotes

There is secrecy and betrayal but that's more part and parcel of the kind of anguish that the people go through. And maybe that's modes of survival, rather than modes of consciousness.

Loneliness comes with life.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

The average human being in America is going through some sort of hard times - physical, emotional, psychological. Everybody's carrying a bit of bone days in them.

What comes out when life squeezes you? When someone hurts or offends you? If anger, pain and fear come out of you, it's because that's what's inside.

I was scared when I lost my mother, my father, my brother, my sister.

Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.

My biggest fear in life is losing the people I love, and the thing with cancer is that it seems that you can't really control it.

Our lives are full of all the genres. Fear and hope and sadness.

The day in 2004 when the radiologist told me I had invasive cancer, I walked down the hospital corridor looking for a phone to call my husband, and I could almost see the fear coming toward me like a big, black shadow.

I believe that everybody comes from pain and a certain amount of dysfunction.

I hated my whole childhood, hated it, hated it, hated it. There was no place for me.

I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her.

The poor monkey, quietly seated on the ground, seemed to be in sore trouble at this display of anger.

Grief is a world you walk through skinned, unshelled.

It is difficult to ever think about your loved one having suffered.

Being alone with fear can rapidly turn into panic. Being alone with frustration can rapidly turn into anger. Being alone with disappointment can rapid turn into discouragement and, even worse, despair.

Grief, for me, is a moment-to-moment experience.

A fundamental and unfortunate part of being alive is to suffer loss and to suffer grief.

...but the truth is that I don't feel like I can carry anyone but myself right now. The streets are empty. I am empty. Or, no--I am full of pain. It's my life that's empty.

Isn't the fear of pain next brother to pain itself?

There is nothing alive more agonized than man / of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.

I remember there was someone. Someone to love. Someone to hate. And I was something. Something special. And proud of it. For a time. Then they turned on me. He turned on me. I remember . . . dying.

Human suffering, while it is asleep, is shapeless. If it is wakened it takes the form of the waker.