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
there was something about that city, though it didn't let me feel guilty that I had no feeling for the things so many others needed. it let me alone.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses a sense of detachment from societal expectations and a personal acceptance of one's indifference.
In this quote, Charles Bukowski reflects on the complexity of emotions and relationships within an urban environment. The city, in its indifference, provides a sense of freedom by allowing him to acknowledge his lack of emotional connection to what others find vital, thereby letting him exist without guilt or pressure to conform to societal norms.
Themes
CityIndifferenceFreedomEmotionDetachment
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about urban life and sensory experience.
More from Charles Bukowski
All quotes βwhen I am feeling low all i have to do is watch my cats and my courage returns
Charles BukowskiRead
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.
Charles BukowskiRead
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.
Charles BukowskiRead
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.
Charles BukowskiRead
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.
Charles BukowskiRead
Similar quotes
Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided.
AristotleRead
You must see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two.
Hayao MiyazakiRead
Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment is with-held, the better for you; for compound interest on compound interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible.
Albert CamusRead
Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility
Barbara KingsolverRead
More-radical scholars insist that an inherent clash exists between science and our long-held conceptions about consciousness and moral agency: if you accept that our brains are a myriad of smaller components, you must reject such notions as character, praise, blame, and free will.
Paul BloomRead