"the writing of some
men
is like a vast bridge
that carries you
over
the many things
that claw and tear.

"The Wine of Forever""
— Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)

"they say that
nothing is wasted:
either that
or
it al is"
— Charles Bukowski

"The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable."
— Charles Bukowski

"Poetry is what happens when nothing else can."
— Charles Bukowski

"I went to the worst of bars
hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.
"
— Charles Bukowski

"dogs and angels are not
very far apart"
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"I suppose like others
I have come through fire and sword,
love gone wrong,
head-on crashes, drunk at sea,
and I have listened to the simple sound of water running
in tubs
and wished to drown"
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"I sit here
drunk now.
I am
a series of
small victories
and large defeats
and I am as
amazed
as any other
that
I have gotten
from there to
here
without committing murder
or being
murdered;
without
having ended up in the
madhouse.

as I drink alone
again tonight
my soul despite all the past
agony
thanks all the gods
who were not
there
for me
then."
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"I could scream down 90 mountains
to less than dust
if only one living human had eyes in the head
and heart in the body,
but there is no chance,
my god,
no chance.
rat with rat dog with dog hog with hog,
play the piano drunk
listen to the drunk piano,
realize the myth of mercy
stand still
as even a child's voice snarls
and we have not been fooled,
it was only that we wanted to believe."
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"you've got to burn
straight up and down
and then maybe sidewise
for a while
and have your guts
scrambled by a
bully
and the demonic
ladies,
you've got to run
along the edge of
madness
teetering,
you've got to starve
like a winter
alleycat,
you've go to live
with the imbecility
of at least a dozen
cities,
then maybe
maybe
maybe
you might know
where you are
for a tiny
blinking
moment."
— Charles Bukowski (Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems)

"There's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

"
— Charles Bukowski

"I hope that death contains
less than this."
— Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)

"the tigers have found me
and I do not care."
— Charles Bukowski

"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."
— Charles Bukowski

"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 (Tales of Ordinary Madness)

"The trouble with a mask is it never changes"
— Charles Bukowski

"Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way."
— Charles Bukowski

"What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability."
— Charles Bukowski (Ham on Rye: A Novel)

"what matters most is how well you walk through the fire"
— Charles Bukowski

"you have to die a few times before you can really
live."
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"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."
— Charles Bukowski

"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"
— Charles Bukowski

"When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories)

"People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"when we don't know who to hate. we hate ourselves."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"the one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness.
We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"Until you find something to fight for, you settle for something to fight against."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"There would be a black, six-foot deep gap hacked in the hard ground. That shadow would marry this shadow, and the peculiar, yellowish soil of our locality seal the wound in the whiteness, and yet another snowfall erase the traces of newness in Joan’s grave.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.
I am, I am, I am."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

"I am not young enough to know everything."
— Oscar Wilde

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
— Oscar Wilde

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
— Oscar Wilde

"In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. (Mr. Dumby, Act III)"
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windemere's Fan)

"You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'"
— George Bernard Shaw

"I'm sorry this letter is so long, I didn't have time to make it shorter."
— George Bernard Shaw

"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."
— Mark Twain

"You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."
— C.S. Lewis

"It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."
— Geoffrey Chaucer

"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost."
— Marcel Proust

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
— Oscar Wilde

"We read to know that we are not alone."
— C.S. Lewis

"You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)