Bukowski

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us." 

"Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way." 

"You have to die a few times before you can really 

live." 

"there are worse things 

than being alone 

but it often takes 

decades to realize this 

and most often when you do 

it's too late 

and there's nothing worse 

than too late" 

"what matters most is how well you walk through the fire" 

"We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting" 

"there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock" 

"I wanted the whole world or nothing." 

"those who escape hell 

however 

never talk about 

it 

and nothing much 

bothers them 

after 

that." 

"People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love." 

"It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?" 

"I've never been lonely. I've been in a room -- I've felt suicidal. I've been depressed. I've felt awful -- awful beyond all -- but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude. It's being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness. I'll quote Ibsen, "The strongest men are the most alone." I've never thought, "Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I'll feel good." No, that won't help. You know the typical crowd, "Wow, it's Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there?" Well, yeah. Because there's nothing out there. It's stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I've never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories. That's all. Sorry for all the millions, but I've never been lonely. I like myself. I'm the best form of entertainment I have. Let's drink more wine!" 

"It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun" 

"What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability." 

"The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go." 

Waking Life

Man wants chaos. In fact, he's got to have it. Depression, strife, riots, murder. All this dread. We're irresistibly drawn to that almost orgiastic state created out of death and destruction. It's in all of us. We revel in it. Sure, the media tries to put a sad face on these things, painting them up as great human tragedies; but we all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no! Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers. And they haven't given us any other options outside the occasional, purely symbolic, participatory act of voting. "You want the puppet on the right, or the puppet on the left?" I feel the time has come to project my own inadequacies and dissatisfaction into the sociopolitical and scientific schemes. Let my own lack of a voice be heard. 


Hey, are you a dreamer?
Yeah.
Haven't seen too many of you around lately. Things have been tough lately for dreamers. They say dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore. It's not dead it's just that it's been forgotten, removed from our language. Nobody teaches it so nobody knows it exists. And the dreamer is banished to obscurity. Well, I'm trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming, every day. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds. Our planet is facing the greatest problems it's ever faced, ever. So whatever you do, don't be bored. This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting.

• If the world that we are forced to accept is false and nothing is true, then everything is possible.
•  On the way to discovering what we love, we will find everything we hate, everything that blocks our path to what we desire.
• The comfort will never be comfortable for those who seek what is not on the market. A systematic questioning of the idea of happiness.
• We'll cut the vocal chords of every empowered speaker. We'll yank the social symbols through the looking glass. We'll devalue society's currency. To confront the familiar.
• Society is a fraud so complete and venal that it demands to be destroyed beyond the power of memory to recall its existence.
• Where there is fire we will carry gasoline
• Interrupt the continuum of everyday experience and all the normal expectations that go with it.
• To live as if something actually depended on one's actions
• To rupture the spell of the ideology of commodified consumer society, so our repressed desires of more authentic nature can come forward.
• To demonstrate the contrast between what life presently is and what it could be.
• To immerse ourselves in the oblivion of actions and know we're making it happen. 
• There will be an intensity never before known in everyday life to exchange love and hate, life and death, terror and redemption, repulsions and attractions. 
• An affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified, that it amounts to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation.

Whatever I am right now. I mean, yeah, maybe I only exist in your mind. I'm still just as real as anything else

What are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question and that's this: Which is the most universal human characteristic: fear, or laziness?

They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life?

We have got to realize that we are being conditioned on a mass scale. Start challenging this corporate slave state. The 21st century is going to be a new century. Not the century of slavery; not the century of lies and issues of no significance and classism and statism and all the rest of the modes of control. It's going to be the age of human kind standing up for something pure and something right. What a bunch of garbage! ... liberal, democrat, conservative, republican ... It's all there to control you; two sides of the same coin! Two management teams bidding for control of the CEO job of slavery incorporated. The truth is out there in front of you but they lay out this buffet of lies. I'm sick of it; and I am not going to take a bite out of it! Do you got me?!