"The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable."
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Quote collection
Charles Bukowski quotes (page 2 of 41)
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"The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting."
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"I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them."
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"Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was."
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"Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors."
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"I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of."
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"Wherever the crowd goes run in the other direction. They're always wrong."
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"You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics."
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"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."
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"There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out."
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"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start."
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"There's a light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness."
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"Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important. I mean it's not even as important (physically) as excretion. A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement."
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"Are people crazy? People waited all their lives. They waited to live, they waited to die. They waited in line to buy toilet paper. They waited in line for money. And if they didn't have any money they waited in longer lines. You waited to go to sleep and then you waited to awaken. You waited to get married and you waited to get divorced. You waited for it to rain, you waited for it to stop. You waited to eat and then you waited to eat again. You waited in a shrink's office with a bunch of psychos and you wondered if you were one."
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"I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here."
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"Beauty is nothing, beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it’s for something else."
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"Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire.... Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It's real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you've suddenly become an idiot. There's no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help."
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"Beware of those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone."
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"The world is full of boring, identical and mindless people."
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"And don't forget: time is meant to be wasted, love fails and death is useless."
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