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"...still, I'm lucky: I feast on solitude, I will never miss the crowd. I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me. I sit in bed and wait for the whole thing to go one way or the other. just like everybody else."
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"Solitude with God is a place for pregnancy."

"Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows."

"There is a magic in walking alone, in thinking alone: If there is no one to contact you around, the universe starts contacting you!"

"A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it."

"When you understand that through the power of conversion in solitude you can become great, so many things you've been wasting your time on will no longer interest you. You will even run away from some friends."

"It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place."

"I like the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - like the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, waling the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was."

"Any human companionship, even the dearest and most perfect, would have been alien to her then. She was sufficient unto herself, needing not love nor comradeship nor any human emotion to round out her felicity. Such moments come rarely in any life, but when they do come they are inexpressibly wonderful - as if the finite were for a second infinity - as if humanity were for a space uplifted into divinity - as if all ugliness had vanished, leaving only flawless beauty."
Explore more quotes by Charles Bukowski


"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."


"Since some people had told me that I was ugly, I always preferred shade to the sun, darkness to light."


"The writing of somemenis like a vast bridgethat carries youoverthe many thingsthat claw and tear.The Wine of Forever."


"Endurance is more important than truth because without endurance there can't be any truth. And truth means going to the end like you mean it. That way, death itself comes up short when it grabs."


"You shoulda known the entirety of the trap, a**hole,love means eventual painvictory means eventual defeatgrace means eventual slovenliness,there's no wayout...you see, youunderstand?"


"The street to my left was backed up with traffic and I watched the people waiting patiently in the cars. There was almost always a man and a women, staring straight ahead, not talking. It was, finally, for everyone, a matter of waiting. You waited and you waited- for the hospital, the doctor, the plumber, the madhouse, the jail, papa death himself. First the signal red, then the signal was green. The citizens of the world ate food and watched t.v. and worried about their jobs or lack of the same, while they waited."


"All we do is sleep, and eat and lay around and make love. We're like slugs. Slug-love, I call it."
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