Charles Bukowski Quotes

How could you not want to draw breath one more day? How could your own life be such a cheap commodity? But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.

I wanted to curl up into a fetal position and start sucking my thumb, let my tears and dripping saliva pool under me. Sorry. I tried living, tried being sentient. Can't do it. Can't live in the same universe with that.

Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed.

All the Hennessy and weed can't hide, the pain i feel inside, its like I'm living just to die.

Awareness There is a dark place. A place where I have no eyes, no mouth. No words. I can't cry out because I have no breath. The silence is so deep I want to die. But I can't. The darkness and silence go on forever. It is not a dream. I don't dream.

I never imagined what it would be like to spend a 12-hour day crying and covered in blood.

Life will not break your heart. It'll crush it.

I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden.

Sometimes my heart hurts so much, I beat it with my fists. I try to run. But you cannot run from this. It waits for you. Even when you think you have escaped it, it is there.

It’s not that the actual suffering is so great—though it’s bad enough—but the men seem such big helpless children, and the women so impersonal—little Atlases under a load they know will crush them out at last, but it doesn’t matter. They aren’t conscious any more than their hearts are conscious of their endless business of beating. They have no conscious life, no windows. It makes me ill.

I am livid with rage, sitting here in chains through this mad war which kills any meaning of life... My nerves are shattered and my mind darkened.

I was so broken when I did the first record. I was living in my parents' basement, I didn't know anyone. I was broken-hearted and writing this really dark record. I was at the bottom of a well.

I have seen things in my life that have broken me in spirit.

Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow, washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss.

Don’t make me happy. Please, don’t fill me up and let me think that something good can come of any of this. Look at my bruises. Look at this graze. Do you see the graze inside me? Do you see it growing before your very eyes, eroding me? I don’t want to hope for anything anymore.

O witches, O misery, O hate, to you has my treasure been entrusted! I contrived to purge my mind of all human hope. On all joy, to strangle it, I pounced with the strength of a wild beast. I called to the plagues to smother me in blood, in sand, misfortune was my God.

Very slowly he turned his head back to look at Shmuel, who wasn't crying anymore, merely staring at the floor and looking as if he was trying to convince his soul not to live inside his tiny body anymore, but to slip away and sail to the door and rise up into the sky, gliding through the clouds until it was very far away.'' -The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

And the pain is too much it's too much it's too much and my hands are on my head and I'm rearing back and my mouth is open in a never-ending wordless wail of all the blackness that's inside me. And i fall back into it.

Wish you could turn off the questions, turn off the voices, turn off all sound. Yearn to close out the ugliness, close out the filthiness, close out all light. Long to cast away yesterday, cast away memory, cast away all jeapordy. Pray you could somehow stop uncertainty, somehow stop the loathing, somehow stop the pain. Act on your impulse, swallow the bottle, cut a little deeper, put the gun to your chest.

Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall.

The violence done us by others is often less painful than that which we do to ourselves.

Inwardly, I gouged my eyes out.