I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.
Charles BukowskiRead
I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a rejection of societal norms and an embrace of a free-spirited, non-conformist lifestyle.
In this quote, Charles Bukowski reveals his affinity for those who live on the fringes of society, identifying with their freedom from societal constraints. He articulates a deep-seated aversion to laws, morals, and rules that dictate behavior, asserting his desire to exist without being molded by societal expectations.
In practice
A great opening line for a discussion about individuality in a philosophy class.
I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.
when I am feeling low all i have to do is watch my cats and my courage returns
The masses are always wrong...Wisdom is doing everything the crowd does not do. All you do is reverse the totality of their learning and you have the heaven they're looking for.
I'm going to open another vottle. not a vottle, but a bottle. you open it and I'll drink it. and you try to write as much as I did without falling off of your chair.
To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, canβt sit still, move, or even go decently insane.
I lapsed into my pathetic cut-off period. Often with humans, both good and bad, my senses simply shut off, they get tired, I give up. I am polite. I nod. I pretend to understand because I donβt want anybody to be hurt. That is the one weakness that has lead me into the most trouble. Trying to be kind to others I often get my soul shredded into a kind of spiritual pasta. No matter. My brain shuts off. I listen. I respond. And they are too dumb to know that I am not there.
But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.
(The Tao) is always present and always available. . . . If you are willing to be lived by it, you will see it everywhere, even in the most ordinary things.
Because men believe not in Providence, therefore they do so greedily scrape and hoard. They do not believe in any reward for charity, therefore they will part with nothing.
There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.
Animals are sentient, intelligent, perceptive, funny and entertaining. We owe them a duty of care as we do to children.
In truth, politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.
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