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"What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman."
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"If love has taken us for a ride and passion made us ignore sham and swindle, the time has come to separate the wheat from the chaff and polish up diamonds of trust, neatly, day by day. ['Taken for a ride']"

"Some seem to be desynchronized in their relationships. They feel oppressed, because they cannot move forward together and at the same pace. Their thinking is often incongruent, their motivation disparate. The phone could be a mediator, as it creates an impression to be a perfect reliable friend. However, in the end, it causes rather a sense of isolation, since it divides more than it unites. Eventually it appears not to be such a good friend but only a ghost friend. ['Kein Schwein ruft mich an']"

"This last week has been a little hell for both of us simply because I didn't understand my own feelings. And because I can't understand them, I blame her for provoking in me feelings that make my world seem suddenly unsafe."

"Unless you can be yourself, you won't stay with anyone for long."

"Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to."

"My growth as a human being has been directly proportional to my growth as a marital artist."

"Jake guessed Henry had been pulling shit like this on him so long that Eddie only noticed it when Henry pulled it on someone else " someone like the blonde ticket-seller."

"She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, and said nothing about it, and prayed for the power to forgive, and did forgive. But he can't have found living with her forgiveness all that easy. Breakfast in a haze of forgiveness: coffee with forgiveness, porridge with forgiveness, forgiveness on the buttered toast. He would have been helpless against it, for how can you repudiate something that is never spoken? She resented, too, the nurse, or the many nurses, who had attended my father in the various hospitals. She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone-to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny."

"Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer."

"Men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit."
Explore more quotes by Charles Bukowski


"I guess lesbianism wasn't so rampant in those days, they would've gotten a bunk with each other and just left me alone, you know. Which would have been just as well, you know.."


"It was a joy! Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you."


"If it doesn't come bursting out of youin spite of everything,don't do it.unless it comes unasked out of yourheart and your mind and your mouthand your gut,don't do it."


"If I never see you again I will always carry youinsideoutsideon my fingertipsand at brain edgesand in centerscentersof what I am ofwhat remains."


"Potential," I said, "doesn't mean a thing. You've got to do it. Almost every baby in a crib has more potential than I have."


"I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again."


"She slammed the door andwas gone.I looked at the closed doorand at the doorknoband strangelyI didn't feelalone."


"People need me. I fill them. If they can't see me for a while they get desperate, they get sick. But if I see them too often I get sick. It's hard to feed without getting fed."
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