Mark > Mark's Quotes

“If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose”
― Charles Bukowski and Carl Weissner

“I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“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

“being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“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

“We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting”
― 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

“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

“I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, 'I’m going to pee.' hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking; talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes; the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3am; being told you snore; hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce; but always carring on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she’s now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; her dull friends; your dull friends; your drinking, her dancing; your flirting, her flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side and her doing the same; sleeping together”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: "Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I'll be ready.”
― Charles Bukowski

“if you get married they think you're
finished
and if you are without a woman they think you're
incomplete.”
― Charles Bukowski

“she is no longer
the beautiful woman
she was. she sends
photos of herself
sitting upon a rock
by the ocean
alone and damned.
I could have had
her once. I wonder
if she thinks I
could have
saved her?”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“I said goodbye again
sucking up all that was left of her into the
little that was left of
me. I said, 'don't look for me again. fuck it.
we are all lost. goodbye, goodbye.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“I wish to weep
but sorrow is
stupid.
I wish to believe
but belief is a
graveyard.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“Finally there is nothing here for death to take away.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there”
― Bukowski C.

“I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.”
― Charles Bukowski