"Nothing is permanent in this wicked world, not even our troubles."
— Charlie Chaplin

"Live to the point of tears."
— Albert Camus

"At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman."
— Albert Camus

"To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others."
— Albert Camus

"When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune."
— Albert Camus

"She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so. She looked sad. But as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her."
— Albert Camus

"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."
— Albert Camus

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
— Albert Camus

"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)

"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. "
— Charles Bukowski

"I wanted the whole world or nothing."
— Charles Bukowski (Post Office)

"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)

"whiskey makes the heart beat faster
but it sure doesn't help the
mind and isn't it funny how you can ache just
from the deadly drone of
existence?"
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"...in that drunken place
you would
like to hand your heart to her
and say
touch it
but then
give it back."
— 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)

"life itself is not the miracle.
that pain should be so constant,
that's the miracle -"
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"No wonder Van Gogh blasted his head off. Crows and sunlight. Idle zero. Zero eating your guts like an animal inside, letting you shit and fuck and blink your eyes, but nothing, a nothing."
— Charles Bukowski (Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960 - 1970)

"I drive around the streets
an inch away from weeping,
ashamed of my sentimentality and
possible love."
— Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)

"my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world."
— Charles Bukowski

"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

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
— Mary Oliver (New and Selected Poems)

"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
call to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."
— Mary Oliver

"...there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save."
— Mary Oliver

"Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"
— Mary Oliver

"love be damned now
as love was damned when it
first arrived."
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire.... Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It's real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you've suddenly become an idiot. There's no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help."
— Charles Bukowski

"I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife
inside
because there was no alternative except to hide as long
as possible---
not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance:
trying to connect."
— Charles Bukowski

"I just never felt so fantastically rocky in my entire life."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"HOBBES:
If you don't get a goodnight kiss you get Kafka dreams."
— Bill Watterson

"Reality continues to ruin my life."
— Bill Watterson (The Complete Calvin and Hobbes)

"I'm killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness."
— Bill Watterson

"As long as we're young, we manage to find excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness, we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty, and malice are required just to keep the body at ninety-eight point six, we catch on, we know the scene, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make up a past. Just take a close look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you've come to. There's no mystery about it, no more room for fairy tales; if you've lived this long, it's because you've squashed any poetry you had in you."
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

"That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying."
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night)

"Lots of men are like that, their artistic leanings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs."
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night)

"Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable."
— Theodore Kaczynski

"All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what anyone supposed,
and luckier

"
— Walt Whitman

"The real war will never get in the books."
— Walt Whitman

"In the faces of men and women, I see God."
— Walt Whitman

"The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for."
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

"The heart was made to be broken."
— Oscar Wilde

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."
— 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

"Misfortunes one can endure--they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults--ah!--there is the sting of life."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"The very essence of romance is uncertainty."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays)

"It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it."
— Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband)

"And alien tears will fill for him pity's long broken urn. For his mourners will all be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings)

"Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies."
— Oscar Wilde

"The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we."
— G.K. Chesterton

"We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God."
— G.K. Chesterton