“Peace of mind and heart arrives when we accept what is: having been born into this strange life we must accept the wasted gamble of our days and take some satisfaction in the pleasure of leaving it all behind. cry not for me. grieve not for me. read what I’ve written then forget it all. drink from the well of your self and begin again.”
An ilustrated book of a collection of phrases, poems and texts of the american writer Charles Bukowski by Sara Ambel
“There’s nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death. They don’t honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can’t hear it. Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die.”
light & soul “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.”
“your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is a light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelous the gods wait to delight in you.”
"Some lose all mind and become soul, insane. some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual. some lose both and become accepted"
The minute “I’m always fighting for the next minute,” I tell my wife. then she begins to tell me how mistaken I am. wives have a way of not believing what thier husbands tell them the minute is a very sacred thing. I have fought for each one since my childhood. I continue to fight for each one. I have never been bored or at a loss what to do next.even when I do nothing. I am utilizing my time. why people must go to amusement parks or movies or sit in front of tv sets or work crossword puzzles or go to picnics or visit relatives or travel or do most of the things they do is beyond me. they mutilate minutes, hours, days, lifetimes.
they have no idea of how precious is a minute. I fight to realize the essence of my time. this doesn’t mean that I can’t relax and take an hour off but it must be my choosing. to fight for each minute is to fight for what is possible within yourself, so that your life and your death will not be like theirs. be not like them and you will survive. minute by minute.
there are worse things than being alone but it often takes decades to realize this and most often when you do it’s too late and there’s nothing worse than too late.
“there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock”
“Life’s as kind as you let it be”
end “You have to die a few times before you can really live.”
“There’s nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death. They don’t honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can’t hear it. Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die.
"We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting"
fate “For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.
Art “as the spirit wanes the form appears”
"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way."
Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you’ll never meet them. All right, so we do the best we can. Granted. But we must still realize that love is just the result of a chance encounter. Most people make too much of it
Alone with everybody the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and them men drink too much and nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh. there’s no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate. nobody ever finds the one. the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the madhouses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills.�
“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
My dear, Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover
She was desperate and she was choosey at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn’t have quite enough going for her to become what she imagined herself to be.
“We are Born like this Into this Into these carefully mad wars Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness Into bars where people no longer speak to each other Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings Born into this Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes” How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? "We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."
Stop insisting on clearing your head - Clear your fucking heart instead
Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.
The strongest of the strange you won’t see them often for wherever the crowd is they are not. those odd ones, not many but from them come the few good paintings the few good symphonies the few good books and other works. and from the best of the strange ones perhaps nothing. they are their own paintings their own books their own music their own work.
sometimes I think I see them– say a certain old man sitting on a certain bench in a certain way or a quick face going the other way in a passing automobile or there’s a certain motion of the hands of a bag—boy or a bag— girl while packing supermarket groceries. sometimes it is even somebody you have been living with for some time— you will notice a lightning quick glance never seen from them before.
sometimes you will only note their existance suddenly in vivid recall some months some years after they are gone. I remember such a one— he was about 20 years old drunk at 10 a.m. staring into a cracked New Orleans mirror facing dreaming against the walls of the world where did I go?
Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.”
ordinary “Oh, I don’t mean you’re handsome, not the way people think of handsome. Your face seems kind. But your eyes they’re beautiful. They’re wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a forest on fire.”
Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn't so.
when the violets roar at the sun
they've got us in the cage ruined of grace and senses and heart roars like a lion for what they've done to us “the tigers have found me and I do not care.”
Human relationships didn’t work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death--in a cesspool.”
And the Moon and the Stars and the World
Long walks at night— that’s what good for the soul: peeking into windows watching tired housewives trying to fight off their beer—maddened husbands.
“My ambition is handicapped by laziness”
All our days are marked with unexpected affronts - some disastrous, others less so but the process is wearing and continuous. Attrition rules. Most give way leaving empty spaces where people should be.
“there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.
People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.”
“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”