Charles Bukowski · 238 pages
Rating: (17.7K votes)
“I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can't feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”
“the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.”
“Beauty is nothing, beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it’s for something else.”
“Something else is hurting you - that’s why you need pot or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can’t think.”
“Forgive me, I guess I am off in the head, but I mean, except for a quickie piece of ass it wouldn't matter to me if all the people in the world died. Yes, I know it's not nice. But I'd be as contended as a snail; it was, after all, the people who had made me unhappy.”
“I'm not the cruel type, but they are, and that's the secret.”
“..the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them...”
“to ask them to legalize pot is something like asking them to put butter on the handcuffs before they place them on you, something else is hurting you - that's why you need pot or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can't think, or madhouses or mechanical cunts or 162 baseball games in a season. or vietnam or israel or the fear of spiders. your love washing her yellow false teeth in the sink before you screw.”
“why don't we go back out there and tell them what happened?
because nothing happened except that everybody has been driven insane and stupid by life. in this society there are only two things that count: don't be caught without money and don't get caught high on any kind of high.
(Night Streets of Madness)”
“show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually dirty kitchen, and 5 times out of 9 I'll show you an exceptional man." "show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.”
“bad writing's like bad women: there's just not much you can do about it”
“I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.”
“This birth thing. And this death thing. Each one had it's turn. We entered alone and we left alone. And most of us lived lonely and frightened and incomplete lives. An incomparable sadness descended up on me. Seeing all that life that must die. Seeing all that life that would first turn to hate, to dementia, to neuroses, to stupidity, to fear, to murder, to nothing - nothing in life and nothing in death.”
“I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can’t feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”
“When I get out, I thought, I am going to wait a while and then I am going to come back to this place, I am going to look at it from the outside and know exactly what's going on in there, and I'm going to stare at those walls and I'm going to make up my mind never to get on the inside of them again.”
“We’ve all heard that little woman who says, “Oh, it’s terrible what these young people do to themselves, in my lsi other drugs, is a terrible thing”.
Then you look, the woman who speaks in this way: you have no eyes, no teeth, no brains, no soul, no ass, no mouth, no warmth, no spirit, nothing, just a stick… and avran made you wonder how to reduce it in that state teas and pastries and the church.”
“our sins are manufactured in heaven to create our own hell.”
“did you ever consider that lsd and color TV arrived for our consumption around the same time? Here comes all this explorative color pounding, and what do we do? we outlaw one and fuck up the other.”
“that's ONE thing that's wrong with intellectuals and writers - they don't feel a hell of a lot except their own comfort or their own pain. which is normal but shitty.”
“cunt and Kant and a happy home”
“the free soul is rare,but you know it when you see it- basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them”
“I have met free man in the strangest of places and at ALL ages.”
“I was the only one without. you could hit bottom and then find another bottom. balls.”
“Perché sfotti così la tua bellezza?" le chiesi."Perché non ci vivi insieme, e via?"
"Perché la gente pensa ch'è tutto quel che ho. La bellezza non è niente, la bellezza non dura. Non lo sai quanto sei fortunato, tu, a essere brutto, che se a qualcuno gli piaci, così sai che è per qualche cosa d'altro.”
“I emit, I hiss a rather tired and gentle word like "shit", then tear this page from the machine. it's your.”
“to whom it may concern: please phone me for appointments when you want to see me. I will not answer unsolicited knocks upon the door. I need time to do my work. I will not allow you to murder my work. please understand that what keeps me alive will make me a better person toward and for you when we finally meet under easy and unstrained conditions.”
“Don't you wish you were Charles Bukowski? I can paint to. lift weights. and my little girl think that I am god. then other times, it's not so good.”
“«Καθίσατε να σκεφτείτε στα σοβαρά ότι το LSD και η έγχρωμη τηλεόραση εμφανίστηκαν στην αγορά σχεδόν ταυτόχρονα; Καταφθάνει αυτός ο εκρηκτικός βομβαρδισμός χρωμάτων, κι εμείς τί κάνουμε; Κηρύττουμε παράνομο το ένα και γαμούμε τελείως το άλλο... »”
“Man is the victim of an environment which refuses to understand his soul.”
“My prerogative as your father is to break the face of anyone who fucks with you. And I will, whether you like it or not. So if our boy Oz prefers to have his face in one piece, he’ll treat you like the precious thing you are.”
“Of course,” Armand was saying to Simon, “you know that it was an American, like yourself, who nearly ruined the wine-making in France?” “We’re Canadians.” “But that is the same thing, surely?”
“Cuando el gobierno de Francia decidió, en mayo del 98, reducir la semana laboral de 39 a 35 horas, dando así una elemental lección de cordura, la medida desató clamores de protesta entre empresarios, políticos y tecnócratas. En Suiza, que no tiene problemas de desempleo, me tocó asistir, hace algún tiempo, a un acontecimiento que me dejó turulato. Un plebiscito propuso trabajar menos horas sin disminuir los salarios, y los suizos votaron en contra. Recuerdo que no lo entendí, confieso que sigo sin entenderlo todavía. El trabajo es una obligación universal desde que Dios condenó a Adán a ganarse el pan con el sudor de su frente, pero no hay por qué tomarse tan a pecho la voluntad divina. Sospecho que este fervor laboral tiene mucho que ver con el terror al desempleo, aunque en el caso de Suiza el desempleo sea una amenaza borrosa y lejana, y con el pánico al tiempo libre. Ser es ser útil, para ser hay que ser vendible. El tiempo que no se traduce en dinero, tiempo libre, tiempo de vida vivida por el placer de vivir y no por el deber de producir, genera miedo. Al fin y al cabo, eso nada tiene de nuevo. El miedo ha sido siempre, junto con la codicia, uno de los dos motores más activos del sistema que otrora se llamaba capitalismo.”
“You know, if the sun and the moon were to actually collide, it would set off a cataclysmic reaction of epic proportions. Are you ready to have your world completely obliterated?”
“I've taken the liberty of giving us a full moon. I've arranged for all stoplights to stay green. I've made some phone calls to make sure you keep smiling. I've reserved the space underneath our feet. I've gone all out for you, so why don't you go with me?”
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