1038 – “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”

-Charles Bukowski

908 – Charles Bukowski and the Lack of Ambition

“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

870 – A Poem by Charles Bukowski

lifedance

“the area dividing the brain and the soul
is affected in many ways by
experience—
some lose all mind and become soul:
insane.
some lose all soul and become mind:
intellectual.
some lose both and become:
accepted.”

–Charles Bukowski

705 – “Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside remembering all the years you’ve felt the same.”

–Charles Bukowski

527 – “The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.”

–Charles Bukowski

92 – “We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us.”

– Charles Bukowski [See Source Notes for context]

62 – “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.”

– Charles Bukowski