What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

by Charles Bukowski

the young kids now, they don’t build model warplanes nor do they dream fight in dream rice paddies, they know it’s all useless, ordinary, just a job like sweeping the streets or picking up the garbage, they’d rather go watch a Western or hang out at the mall or go to the zoo or a football game, they’re already thinking of college and automobiles and wives and homes and barbecues, they’re already trapped in another kind of dream, another kind of war, and I guess it won’t kill them as fast, at least not physically.

all people start to come apart finally and there it is: just empty ashtrays in a room or wisps of hair on a comb in the dissolving moonlight. it is all ash and dry leaves and grief gone like an ocean liner. when the shoes fill with blood you know that the shoes are dead. true revolution comes from true revulsion; when things get bad enough the kitten will kill the lion.

I like those things too especially the wild animals and the woman but when I see those lovely old boxcars with their faded painted lettering and those flat cars and those fat round tankers all lined up and waiting I get quiet inside I get what other men get from other things I just feel better and it’s good to feel better whenever you can not needing a reason.

I wish to believe but belief is a graveyard. we have narrowed it down to the butcherknife and the mockingbird.

how to break clear? a .44 magnum? a can of ale? the museum of pain doesn’t charge admission, it’s free as skunkshit.

some lose all mind and become soul: insane. some lose all soul and become mind: intellectual. some lose both and become: accepted.

the world is full of constipated writers. and eager readers who need plenty of new shit. it’s depressing.

you are alone and I am alone and it’s best that we aren’t together comparing our pitiful sorrows.

we all need something we can do well, you know. like scuba diving or opening the morning mail.

some say I love my pain. yes, I love it so much I’d like to give it to you wrapped in a red ribbon wrapped in a bloody red ribbon you can have it you can have it all. I’ll never miss it.

I believe in earning one’s own way but I also believe in the unexpected gift.

my girlfriend comes over, picks up the baby and tortures it in her loving way just as she does me.

when a hot woman meets a hermit one of them is going to change.

I’m so bored, bored, bored, bored, I’m about to go crazy! o.k., I say, and hang up. now she can get un-bored. I wonder who will un-bore her first? probably a bore. an unemployed actor with asthma who likes the 3 Stooges. what she doesn’t realize is that—usually—only boring people get bored.

people are tired strafed by life mutilated either by love or no love.

we don’t need new governments new revolutions we don’t need new men new women we don’t need new ways we just need to care.

there’s no courage there, just the desire to possess something—admiration, fame, lovers, money, any damn thing so long as it comes easy.

if you’re going to try, go all the way. otherwise, don’t even start. if you’re going to try, go all the way. this could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe your mind. go all the way. it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days. it could mean freezing on a park bench. it could mean jail, it could mean derision, mockery, isolation. isolation is the gift,