There’s nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death. They don’t honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can’t hear it. Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die.

Charles Bukowski

It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?

Charles Bukowski

If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it  — If you’re doing it for money or fame, don’t do it. If you’re doing it because you want women in your bed, don’t do it — If it’s hard work just thinking about doing it, don’t do it — If you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. If it never does roar out of you, do something else.

Charles Bukowski

it’s not so much that nothing means
anything but more that it keeps meaning
nothing,

every day should be a miracle instead
of a machination.
in my hand rests the last bluebird.
the shades roar like lions and the walls
rattle, dance around my
head.
then her eyes look at me, love breaks my
bones and I
laugh.

Charles Bukowski

there are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it’s too late
and there’s nothing worse
than
too late.

Charles Bukowski