You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

by Charles Bukowski

it seemed to me that I had never met another person on earth as discouraging to my happiness as my father. and it appeared that I had the same effect upon him.

I had been practicing on the drinking-form since the age of 15. and there was much competition in that field also.

I look into myself and find perfect emptiness. I am out of cigarettes and don’t even have a gun to point. this writer’s block is my only possession.

my death will at most seem an afterthought.

the freeway is a circus of cheap and petty emotions, it’s humanity on the move, most of them coming from some place they hated and going to another they hate just as much or more.

the refrigerator contains 9,000 frozen red hot dreams and as I listen to the symphonies of dead composers I am consumed with a glad sadness there’s fire in the walls and the snails in the garden only want love

what makes us this way?—ingrown toenails?—or that the ladies are not enough?—what foolishness makes us tweak the nose of Death continually?