You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

by Charles Bukowski

some men never die and some men never live but we’re all alive tonight.

the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing in and out out and in these punks these cowards these champions these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light toward us impossibly.

there is a place in the heart that will never be filled a space and even during the best moments and the greatest times we will know it we will know it more than ever there is a place in the heart that will never be filled and we will wait and wait in that space.

she just looks, half-believing…a cigarette dangling, she’s half- insane, looking for an out; she’s hard, she’s scared, she’s been fooled, taken, abused, used, over- used… but, under all that, to me she’s the flower, I see her as she was before she was ruined by the lies: theirs and hers. to me, she’s new again as I am new: we have a chance together. I walk over and fill her drink: “you got class, doll, you’re not like the others…” she likes that and I like it too because to make a thing true all you’ve got to do is believe.

actually, her life is boring and rather common but most are—mine is too except when lifted by whiskey

she’s cute, really, and pitiful, all she wants is what she always wanted, only it’s getting further and further away.

it has been a beautiful fight still is.

they were unaware that achievement or victory or luck or whatever the hell you want to call it must have its defeats. it’s only the re-gathering and going on which lends substance to whatever magic might possibly evolve. and now as we ready to self-destruct there is very little left to kill which makes the tragedy less and more much much more.

there is nothing that will put a person more in touch with the realities than an 8 hour job.

let them have the stage so long as I need not be in the audience.

I found the best thing I could do was just to type away at my own work and let the dying die as they always have.

the courage it took to get out of bed each morning to face the same things over and over was enormous.

most of the people in the world could care less and I often feel the same way.

I was their bar freak, they needed me to make themselves feel better. just like, at times, I needed that graveyard.

each man’s hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind my ruined face.

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 freeways are a lesson in what we have become and most of the crashes and deaths are the collision of incomplete beings, of pitiful and demented lives. when I drive the freeways I see the soul of humanity of my city and it’s ugly, ugly, ugly: the living have choked the heart away.

agony sometimes changes form but it never ceases for anybody.

one comes through it all with a certain amount of efficiency and bravery then leaves some accept the possibility of God to help them get through others take it straight on and to these I drink tonight.

Norman, you would never guess what has happened to me what has happened to all of us. I remember your saying: “make it or break it.” neither happened and it won’t.

the price of creation is never too high. the price of living with other people always is.

finally, starved and beaten, I had to go into the streets to be interviewed for low-paying and monotonous jobs by strange men behind desks men without eyes men without faces who would take my hours break them piss on them.

sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone are the dead rattling the walls that close us in.

“the worst thing,” he told me, “is bitterness, people end up so bitter.”

one of Lorca’s best lines is, “agony, always agony…” think of this when you kill a cockroach or pick up a razor to shave or awaken in the morning to face the sun.

sometimes it’s hard to know what to do.

take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning.

the best part was pulling down the shades stuffing the doorbell with rags putting the phone in the refrigerator and going to bed for 3 or 4 days. and the next best part was nobody ever missed me.

I love you but don’t know what to do.

we all hold up well for a while, then inherent with flaws and skips and misses most of us so often deteriorate overnight into a state so near defecation that the end result is almost unbearable to the senses.

what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.