Charles Bukowski · 240 pages
Rating: (7.6K votes)
“Are there good governments and bad governments? No, there are only bad governments and worse governments.”
“Even the stove and the refrigerator looked human, I mean good human - they seemed to have arms and voices and they said, hang around, kid, it's good here, it can be very good here.”
“إننا نعيش كل حياتنا كالحمقى ثم نموت في نهاية المطاف”
“She had chosen me and it was as simple as that.”
“I got my hands under the breasts, lifted them. Tons of meat. Meat without mouth or eye. MEAT MEAT MEAT. i slammed it into my mouth and flew into heaven.”
“الفرق بين الديموقراطية والديكتاتورية أننا في الديموقرطية ننتخب أولاً ثم نتلقى الأوامر، أما في الديكتاتورية فلا حاجة إلى تضييع الوقت في الإنتخابات ص 270”
“هل توجد حكومات جيدة وحكومات سيئة؟ لا، هناك حكومات سيئة فقط وحكومات أشد سوءًا ص 273”
“I went into the crapper and took myself a beautiful beershit. Then I went to bed, jacked off, and slept.”
“Two bulls fighting for the cow. And a bony one at that. But in America the loser oftentimes got the cow. Mother instinct? Better wallet? Longer dick? God knows what.…”
“Oh, you’ve got a sweet voice, baby, such a sad sad sweet voice, I’d like to fuck you, I thought.”
“I bought two tall six-packs of Schlitz and went back to my place and drank down the requiem.”
“But I gave the girl my address and phone number, thinking we might make it on the springs. (Harriet, you never arrived.)”
“But it’s all the little people, Buk, the twenty-five-buck-a-week guys who gave up everything to keep the thing going. The guys with cardboard in their shoes. The guys who slept on the floor.”
“العمر ليس جريمة، الجريمة أن غالبية البشر يهرمون على نحو سيء ص 286”
“They kept chirping and flipping and fingering their mental assholes.”
“It was con; my mind was blank; I only wanted a halfpint of Grandad and six or seven tall cool beers . . .”
“At lunchtime (10:24 p.m.) I went out and bought the L.A. Times.”
“الجمال لا شيء، الجمال لا يدوم، لا تعلم كم أنت محظوظ لأنك قبيح، لأن الناس لو أحبوك فأنت تعلم أنهم يحبوك لشيء آخر ص 11”
“البشر الصغار هم دائماً كبش الفداء، هذا هو التاريخ ص 196”
“راهنوا فقط عندما تسمحون لأنفسكم بالخسارة. أعني من دون أن تجدوا أنفسكم تنامون على مقعد في حديقة أو فاتتكم 3 أو 4 وجبات. الأهم، هو أن تدفعوا إيجار الشقة أولاً. تجنبوا الضغوط ص 159”
“So I drank every night after work, alone, up at my place and I had enough left for a day at the track on Saturday, and life was simple and without too much pain. Maybe without too much reason, but getting away from pain was reasonable enough.”
“...there comes a time in each man's life when he must choose to stand or run. I choose to stand.”
“وحدهم الفقراء من يفهمون معنى الحياة، أما الأغنياء والامنون يمكنهم أن يخمنوا فقط ص 175”
“يتطلب الأمر جرأة لتحاول مرة أخرى ص 195”
“لم يكن الكلب يكترث كم أملك أو لا أملك من المال. كلب حقيقي ص 140”
“هذا ما يفكر فيه الجميع: أنا لا انتمي إلى هنا. هذا ما يقوله كل فردٍ منهم بينه وبين نفسه.
هم محقون، وماذا بعد ؟ ص 141”
“أنا عبقري ولكن لا أحد يعرف ذلك سواي ص 147”
“الجشع البشري لا يعرف حدوداً ويواصل تغذية نفسه ص 156”
“إذا أردتم أن تعرفوا أي الطرق هي الأنسب، اختاروا الطريقة المعاكسة لخيار الجمهور ص 156”
“Was it our fault?” Qibli asked immediately. “She must be furious about us escaping with Hailstorm.”
“If you’re going to rattle my cage, you better make sure I’m padlocked in it.”
“Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland.”
“Her skin was as white as snow, her lips as red as blood, and her long hair as black as ebony.”
“Perhaps he can avoid being stretched by falling in a horizontal position, legs and head at the same altitude. Yet when the giant tries it, he finds a new discomfort; the stretching sensation is replaced by an equal feeling of compression. He feels as if his head is being pressed toward his feet. To understand why this is so, let’s temporarily imagine that the Earth is flat. Here is what it would look like. The vertical lines, together with the arrows, indicate the direction of the gravitational force—not surprisingly, straight down. But more than that, the strength of the gravitational pull is entirely uniform. The 2,000-Mile Man would have no trouble in this environment, whether he fell vertically or horizontally—not until he hit the ground anyway. But the Earth is not flat. Both the strength and the direction of gravity vary. Instead of pulling in a single direction, gravity pulls directly toward the center of the planet, like this: This creates a new problem for the giant if he falls horizontally. The force on his head and feet will not be the same because gravity, as it pulls toward the center of the Earth, will push his head toward his feet, leading to the strange sensation of being compressed. Let’s return”
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