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.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“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.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“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.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“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.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“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.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“I'm not the cruel type, but they are, and that's the secret.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“..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...”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“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.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“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)”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary 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.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“bad writing's like bad women: there's just not much you can do about it”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“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.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“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.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“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.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“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.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“our sins are manufactured in heaven to create our own hell.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“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.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“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.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“cunt and Kant and a happy home”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“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”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“I have met free man in the strangest of places and at ALL ages.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“I was the only one without. you could hit bottom and then find another bottom. balls.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“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.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“I emit, I hiss a rather tired and gentle word like "shit", then tear this page from the machine. it's your.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“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.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“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.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“«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... »”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“Man is the victim of an environment which refuses to understand his soul.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“Maybe he hadn't thought the war through. It had seemed like simple fun when he had first pictured it, with a glorious beginning, a difficult but valor-filled middle, and a victorious end. He hadn't accounted for the fact that there might not be much of a resolution to the battle, and he hadn't imagined what it would feel like when the war just sort of ended, without anyone admitting defeat and congratulating him for his bravery.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from The Wild Things
“Mom said when she brought us beachcombing? She told us to always believe in something more. She told us to look at what was right in front of us, and we’d see that even a grain of sand was a miracle. That even a bit of glass was a message, that the universe was full of tricks and clues and signs.”
― Nancy Thayer, quote from Beachcombers
“Sometimes I feel as though the real things are passing me by. As though I've been pushed to the margins of life.”
― Margaret Leroy, quote from The Soldier's Wife
“oh. It's an E.E. Cummings quote: 'It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are”
― Laura Kaye, quote from One Night with a Hero
“Living in the here and now, we are awash with sensations of the present, memories of the past, and expectations and fears for the future. Our actions are not determined by any one cause; they are the fulfillment of who we are at that particular moment. After that moment passes, we continue to evolve, to change, and our memories of that moment inevitably change with us as we live with the consequences of our past actions, consequences we were unaware of at the time.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
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