1. “Those who would judge us merely by the heights we have achieved would do well to remember the depths from which we started.”
~ Kwame Nkrumah, 1st President of Ghana
2. “No, I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality.”
—Muhammad Ali
3. “What good are my visions or your visions, beautifully and laboriously worked out in art, if the purpose of it is not to save the something in our souls and make it all beautiful.”
~Jack Kerouac
4. “If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.”
~ Charles Bukowski
5. “all that I know is that I believe in the sound of music and the running of a horse. all else is squabble.”
~ Charles Bukowski
6. “Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.”
~ Charles Bukowski
7. “R.O.T.C. kept me away from sports while the other guys practiced every day. They made the school teams, won their letters and got the girls. My days were spent mostly marching around in the sun. All you ever saw were the backs of some guy’s ears and his buttocks.”
~ Charles Bukowski, from the novel “Ham On Rye”
8. “Lighting new cigarettes,
pouring more
drinks.
It has been a beautiful
fight.
Still
is.”
~ Charles Bukowski
9. “We waited and waited. All of us. Didn’t the shrink know that waiting was one of the things that drove people crazy? People waited all their lives. They waited to live, they waited to die. They waited in line to buy toilet paper. They waited in line for money. And if they didn’t have any money they waited in longer lines. You waited to go to sleep and then you waited to awaken. You waited to get married and you waited to get divorced. You waited for it to rain, you waited for it to stop. You waited to eat and then you waited to eat again. You waited in a shrink’s office with a bunch of psychos and you wondered if you were one.”
-Charles Bukowski
10. “We are all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
~ Charles Bukowski
11. “Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‘Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?’
“They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.”
~ Charles Bukowski, in a letter to publisher John Martin
12. “We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
~ Charles Bukowski
13.
“one day Manuel returned to the place, and
she was gone –
no argument, no note, just
gone, all her clothes
all her stuff, and
Manuel sat by the window and looked out
and didn’t make his job
the next day or the
next day or
the day after, he
didn’t phone in, he
lost his job, got a
ticket for parking, smoked
four hundred and sixty cigarettes, got
picked up for common drunk, bailed
out, went
to court and pleaded
guilty.
when the rent was up he
moved from Beacon street, he
left the cat and went to live with
his brother and
they’d get drunk
every night
and talk about how
terrible
life was.
Manuel never again smoked
long slim cigars
because Shirley always said
how
handsome he looked
when he did.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell
14. “The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.”
– Frederich Nietzsche
15. “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” –Helder Pessoa Camara (1909-1999), Archbishop of Recife & Olinda, Brazil
16. “When propaganda is passed off as truth, we are forced to recognize the most unfathomable lies.”
–MDSHall
17. “Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.”
~Anne Carson
18. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery
19. “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent. ”
–Victor Hugo
Compiled in collaboration with the Weird World of Words Collective, 2019.
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