Charles Bukowski Quotes

I feel like sometimes that I was not meant for this society.

I had turned into a trophy wife - and I sucked at it. I wasn't detail-oriented enough to maintain a perfect house or be a perfect hostess. I could no longer hide my boredom when the men talked and the women smiled and listened. I wasn't interested in Botox or makeup or reducing the appearance of the scars from my C-sections.

I don't expect to seem cool to everyone; nor do I want to be. I think that's the opposite of the definition of cool. So I don't care at all.

Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? – diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states . Why, if they follow this conformity business they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.

I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all

My schooling was very conservative. I went to Trinity School, and then to the Hill School, which is a boarding school, then to Yale. My parents got divorced in that period, and I realized I didn't have a life anymore. I was the only child, so a three-person family breaks apart. I ended up very conformist, very scared, very lonely. I couldn't go on with Yale, just couldn't do it. I'd been doing too much of that for too long. I didn't know what I wanted, but I knew what I didn't want, which was to go to Wall Street and join the crowd there.

I know I'm tired of thinking about what I should have done yesterday. I know I'm just tired. If I knew what to do with my life, how to fix it up, I would have done it a long time ago. You can't dig that? You think I want to live like I'm somebody's throwaway?

We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.

I got tired of doing battle with people thinking I was a little weird because I wasn't in a band making happy, stilted music. The only people who really seem weird to me are people who think they're normal. People who think it's possible to be normal just by doing the same things that most people do. Is there a most people? I don't know. Television makes it seem like there is, but I think that might just be television.

If you decide to just go with the flow, you'll end up where the flow goes, which is usually downhill, often leading to a big pile of sludge and a life of unhappiness. You'll end up doing what everyone else is doing.

Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one at all.

I don't think playing it safe constitutes a retreat, necessarily. In other words, I don't think if, by playing safe he means we are not going to delve into controversy, then if that's what he means he's quite right. I'm not going to delve into controversy. Somebody asked me the other day if this means that I'm going to be a meek conformist, and my answer is no. I'm just acting the role of a tired non-conformist.

Society was calling to its accomplished child to come, to be taken care of, to be instructed, to be judged, to be condemned; it called him to return to that rubbish heap from which he had wandered away, so that justice could be done.

I had a lot of anger against the way things 'should be done' - conforming to social norms, ticking boxes to gain acceptance. Frustration at the pointlessness and predictability of smalltalk. Oh and a lot of anger about tea, which the British seem to use to avoid actually saying anything.

It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line.

Everything you think you're supposed to feel even, or do. When it doesn't match up with what everything that the culture is telling you to do, you feel like a failure.

You can't be a clothes hanger for your entire life.

I don't think anyone aims to be typical, really. Most people even vow to themselves some time in high school or college not to be typical. But still, they just kind of loop back to it somehow. Like the circular rails of a train at an amusement park, the scripts we know offer a brand of security, of predictability, of safety for us. But the problem is, they only take us where we've already been. They loop us back to places where everyone can easily go, not necessarily where we were made to go. Living a different kind of life takes some guts and grit and a new way of seeing things.

Those who think are excessively few; and those few do not set themselves to disturb the world.

I wasn't accepted because I didn't accept the drug culture that most of my peers were involved in. Now it's like a locked room.

The outside wold pressures you into a mold, but if you don't accept that - you gamble with life. Call it gambling.

I'm not a soldier for anything, either. I'm only a singer and I don't think it makes a difference what we sing.

I think girls are especially worried about being judged, and when you're in high school, everything seems like a bigger deal than it is. As soon as you're out, it feels like forever ago-zip-a-dee-doo-dah! So do what you want, and if people are going to judge you for it, who cares? You might not fit in, but that's okay.

They were never my pack, not even Hot Pie and Gendry. I was stupid to think so, just a stupid little girl, and no wolf at all.

These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity.