Quotes from Ham on Rye

“What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“It was a joy! Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even during the day with covers pulled up to my chin. It was good in there, nothing ever occurred in there, no people, nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“You are thirty minutes late."
"Yes."
"Would you be thirty minutes late to a wedding or a funeral?"
"No."
"Why not, pray tell?"
"Well, if the funeral was mine I'd have to be on time. If the wedding was mine it would be my funeral.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“I knew I was strong, and maybe like they said, "crazy." But I had this feeling inside of me that something real was there.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“Fiction is an improvement on life”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“And my own affairs were as bad, as dismal, as the day I had been born. The only difference was that now I could drink now and then, though never often enough. Drink was the only thing that kept a man from feeling forever stunned and useless. Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought. God, they all had assholes and sexual organs and their mouths and their armpits. They shit and they chattered and they were dull as horse dung. The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun. I would certainly never be able to be happy, to get married, I could never have children. Hell, I couldn't even get a job as a dishwasher.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“Getting drunk was good. I decided that I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious and maybe if you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn't become so obvious yourself.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“It seemed better to delay thinking.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“So, that’s what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That’s what they needed. People were fools. It was going to be easy for me.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“People don't do me much good.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“They laughed. Things were funny. They weren't afraid to care. There was no sense to life, to the structure of things.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“You just rebel against everything. How are you going to survive?

I don't know. I'm already tired.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“I had no interests. I had no interests in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go. Suicide? Jesus Christ, just more work. I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn't let me.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“just heard a commercial
which told me
Farmer John smokes his own
bacon.
now, there's one tough
son of a
bitch.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“Turgenev was a very serious fellow but he could make me laugh because a truth first encountered can be very funny. When someone else's truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it just for you, that's great.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was alway controlling who got a chance and who didn't.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“It didn't pay to trust another human being. Humans didn't have it, whatever it took.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“since some people had told me that I was ugly, I always preferred shade to the sun, darkness to light”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“The dog approached again, cautiously. I found the bologna sandwich, ripped off a chunk, wiped the cheap watery mustard off, then placed it on the sidewalk.
The dog walked up to the bit of sandwich, put his nose to it, sniffed, then turned and walked off. This time he didn't look back. He accelerated down the street.
No wonder I had been depressed all my life. I wasn't getting proper nourishment. ”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

“That the young rich smell the stink of the poor and learn to find it a bit amusing. They had to laugh, otherwise it would be too terrifying.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Ham on Rye

About the author

Popular quotes

“...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from El segundo sexo

“He was creating the first letters of the Slavonic alphabet. He started with rounded letters, but the Slavonic language was so wild that the ink could not hold it, and so he made a second alphabet of barred letters and caged the unruly language in them like a bird.”
― Milorad Pavić, quote from Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words

“People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.
...
She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn't seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from The Big Rock Candy Mountain (Contemporary American Fiction)

“This is not to say that eyewitness testimony is worthless; quite the reverse. In certain circumstances it is invaluable in order to secure convictions. Rather, it is to say that memories should be coaxed out of witnesses with sensitivity to the biases that might otherwise contaminate the evidence. The tragedy is that the techniques used by police, until recently, had little of this sophistication.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“You never know just what you can do until you try.”
― Joseph Delaney, quote from The Spook's Apprentice

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.