when I am feeling low all i have to do is watch my cats and my courage returns
Charles BukowskiRead
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.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the deep connection between beauty and despair in Bukowski's mind.
Charles Bukowski's quote exposes the intricate relationship between appreciation of natural beauty and the contemplation of darker thoughts. It suggests that moments of reflection near bodies of water or while crossing bridges trigger profound feelings of vulnerability or existential despair, highlighting how beauty can coexist with pain in life.
In practice
During a mental health seminar to highlight the complexity of emotions.
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.
He asked, "what makes a man a writer?" "well," I said, "it's simple, it's either you get it down on paper or you jump off a bridge. writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers." "are you desperate?" "I don't know.
You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered.
Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the morbid.
Who are those people by whom you wish to be admired? Are they not these whom you are in the habit of saying that they are mad? What then? Do you wish to be admired by the mad?
No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.
The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.
Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
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