Sifting Through The Madness Quotes

but isn't there always one good thing to look back on? think of how many cups of coffee we drank together.

Why do we embroider everything we say with special emphasis when all we really need to do is simply say what needs to he said? Of course the fact is that there is very little that needs to be said.

from the beginning, through the middle years and up to the end: too bad, too bad, too bad.

the last cigarettes are smoked, the loaves are sliced, and lest this be taken for wry sorrow, drown the spider in wine. you are much more than simply dead: I am a dish for your ashes, I am a fist for your vanished air. the most terrible thing about life is finding it gone.

don’t be like so many writers, don’t be like so many thousands of people who call themselves writers, don’t be dull and boring and pretentious, don’t be consumed with self- love. the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind. don’t add to that. don’t do it.

no concept of danger, reality, flow or compassion. you can feel the despair escaping from their machines, their lives as hopeless and as numbed as yours.

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, 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.

little sun little moon little dog and a little to eat and a little to love and a little to live for in a little room filled with little mice who gnaw and dance and run while I sleep waiting for a little death in the middle of a little morning in a little city in a little state my little mother dead my little father dead in a little cemetery somewhere. I have only a little time to tell you this: watch out for little death when he comes running but like all the billions of little deaths it will finally mean nothing and everything: all your little tears burning like the dove, wasted.

then I was a young man a thousand years old, and now I am an old man waiting to be born.

often it takes a lifetime to learn how to react to certain critical situations. it's worth waiting for the arrival of maturity and confidence. try it sometime and see how delightful it is to feel powerful and alive.

Creation is like anything else good: You have to wait on it; ambition has killed more Artists than indolence.

It’s hell when you’re too good to make money.

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.

burning in hell this piece of me fits in nowhere as other people find things to do with their time places to go with one another things to say to each other. Iam burning in hell some place north of Mexico. flowers don’t grow here. I am not like other people other people are like other people. they are all alike: joining grouping huddling they are both gleeful and content andIam burning in hell. my heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people. I’d die on their picnic grounds smothered by their flags slugged by their songs unloved by their soldiers gored by their humor murdered by their concern. I am not like other people. Iam burning in hell. the hell of myself.

What you see on the freeway is just what there is, a funeral procession of the dead, the greatest horror of our time in motion. I’ll see you there tomorrow!

This future running toward us paralyzes the wallet and the brain.

anyhow, I’m now using the knife the reader sent me to clean my fingernails. better this than ripping it deep into somebody’s guts. I prefer to do that with the poem.

Now we are citizens of nothing. the sun itself knows the sad truth of how we surrendered our lives and deaths to simple ritual….how we said no, no, no, no to the most beautiful YES ever uttered - life itself.

please take a picture of this: a 70-year-old white whale lurking within the warm white whirling water. how did he last? how did he escape all the harpoons for all those years? why didn’t he get beached along the way on the dry shore? how did he evade so many schools of hungry sharks?

tonight this room is smoky and I am alone listening to the silence. I am tired of waiting on life, it was so slow to arrive and so quick to leave. the streets and the cities are empty, love is on the damned cross and death laughs in the back room. at the edge, the edge, the edge.

You think of killing him on the spot but discard that thought and leave, down into the urine-stinking elevator, they have you crucified too, America at work, where they rip out your intestines and your brain and your will and your spirit. They suck you dry, then throw you away. The capitalist system. The work ethic. The profit motive. The memory of your father’s words, “work hard and you’ll be appreciated.” of course, only if you make much more for them than they pay you.

once again I hear of somebody who is going to settle down and do their work, painting or writing or whatever, as soon as they get a better light installed, orassoonastheymovetoanew city, or as soon as they come back from the trip they have been planning, or as soon as . . . it’s simple: they just don’t want to do it, or they can’t do it, otherwise they’d feel a burning itch from hell they could not ignore and “soon” would turn quickly into “now.

nothing like a hot bath in a cold world

We must be patient with the gods they like to have fun they like to play with us. they like to test us. they like to tell us that we are weak and stupid, that we are finished. the gods need to be amused. we are their toys.

nobody can save you nobody can save you but yourself. you will be put again and again into nearly impossible situations. they will attempt again and again through subterfuge, guise and force to make you submit, quit and/or die quietly inside. nobody can save you but yourself and it will be easy enough to fail so very easily but don’t, don’t, don’t. just watch them. listen to them. do you want to be like that? a faceless, mindless, heartless being? do you want to experience death before death? nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. it’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it. think about it. think about saving your self. Charles Bukowski, Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way: New Poems (Ecco, January 6, 2004)

(Take a deep breath for this next run-on sentence) I believe that two people can fall madly in love and sift that fairy-tale feeling up through the raging sands of reality to settle on top as a polished stone of true joy, where the "happily ever after" will be something two mortals are working towards and not a finished product.

the way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out from the heart.

SCREW YOU GUYS! I’M A GENIUS!

the gods first play with you and then play against you.

nothing like a hot bath in a cold world.

I am tired of waiting on life, it was so slow to arrive and so quick to leave.

we were made to accomplish the easy things and made to live through the things that are hard.

The horse reared back and frightened its rider, a local white woman. For the “crime” of frightening a white woman on a road, this woman spent years at Crownsville. That was all Joyce could see in documents about her psychiatric history. Sifting through patient records, Joyce regularly came across similar strange notes. “You’d read stories like that, that had no reason why they should be in Crownsville,” Joyce said to me incredulously. “They came to Crownsville and never got out.

I need more balance, a more distanced perspective. I should accept what is. nightmares are a part of existence.