Charles Bukowski Quotes

The years rolled slowly past and I found myself alone. Surrounded by strangers I thought were my friends, I found myself further and further from my home.

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.

When you left on Saturday, I felt a horrible void, I saw you everywhere, on the beach, in your room, in the garden: impossible for me to get used to the idea that you had left.

I'm so secluded. Very alone.

When thinking about companions gone, we feel ourselves doubly alone.

Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate; all that was once so beautiful is dead.

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.

After Balasaheb died, I have not spoken. What do I say?

She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.

Julia looked back at Hadassah on the bloodstained sand. A great emptiness opened within her as she looked at the still form. Gone, too, was the salt that had kept her from completely corruption.

My heart broke all over again. I wanted my life back, my mama, but I knew I would never have that. The child I had been was gone with the child she had been. We were new people, and we didn't know each other anymore. I shook my head desperately.

When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really truly gone?

There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.

It really kind of sucked to be close to someone for so long and then suddenly not be anything anymore.

The girl was lighter without her heart. She danced barefoot on the hot roads, and her feet were not cut by the glass or stones that studded her way. She spoke to the dead whenever they visited her. She tried to be kind, but they realised that they no longer had anything in common with her, and she realised it, too. So they went their separate ways.

There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can't cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.

More and more I find myself at a loss for words and didn't want to hear other people talking either. Their conversations seemed false and empty. I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone.

The clothes are packed off to Goodwill I said my good-byes up on the hill The house is empty, the furniture sold Soon your smell will decay to mold Don't know why I bother calling, ain't nobody answering Don't know why I bother singing, ain't nobody listening "Disconnect" Collateral Damage, Track 10

but then she did. she died. no more visits, no more phone calls. And without even realizing it, I began to drift, as if my roots had been pulled, as if I were floating down some side branch of a river.

I still cry on waking. I'm not sure why. I feel nothing. Nothing I can name, anyway. It's like breathing - something that happens over which I have no control. (6)

I was like a lost moon―my planet destroyed in some cataclysmic, disaster-movie scenario of desolation―that continued, nevertheless, to circle in a tight little orbit around the empty space left behind, ignoring the laws of gravity.

One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world.