Charles Bukowski

we drove on and on, past little villages and both good things and bad things were happening to the people in those villages too, but I still was nothing but arms and ears and eyes and maybe there'd be either some good luck for me or more death tomorrow.

A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.

I would certainly end up forever crying the blues into a coffee cup in a park for old men playing chess or silly games of some sort.

I once lay in a white hospital for the dying and the dying self, where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die, where on my knees I prayed for LIGHT, I prayed for l*i*g*h*t, and praying crawled like a blind slug into the web where threads of wind stuck against my mind and I died of pity for Man, for myself, on a cross without nails, watching in fear as the pig belches in his sty, farts, blinks and eats.

I suppose like others I have come through fire and sword, love gone wrong, head-on crashes, drunk at sea, and I have listened to the simple sound of water running in tubs and wished to drown

I remember when each 4th lot was vacant and overgrown, and the landlord only go this rent when you had it, and each day was clear and good and each moment was full of promise.

to fight for each minute is to fight for what is possible within yourself, so that your life and your death will not be like theirs.

When you clean up a city, you destroy it.

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.

And it seems people should not build houses anymore it seems people should stop working and sit in small rooms on second floors under electric lights without shades; it seems there is a lot to forget and a lot not to do and in drugstores, markets, bars, the people are tired, they do not want to move, and I stand there at night and look through this house and the house does not want to be built