Thread: Memorable Passages

The sun love the moon so much that he died every night to make her breathe.

back to the machinegun

I awaken about noon and go out to get the mail
in my old torn bathrobe.
I'm hungover
hair down in my eyes

barefooted
tenderly stepping upon small rocks and branches

still afraid of pain behind my four day beard

as the young housewife next door shakes a rug
out of her window and sees me:
"hello, Hank!"

god damn, it's almost like being shot in the ass
with a .22

"hello," I say
gathering up my Visa card bill, my PENNYSAVER,
the Dept. of Water and Power

plus a notice from the Weed Abatement Department
giving me 32 days to clean up my act

I mince back again over the various debris
thinking, maybe I'll write tonight, they seem
to be closing in

there's only one way to handle those motherfuckers

the night harness races will have to wait.


- Bukowski

Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago.Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.


- Czeslaw Milosz

“Let us live and love, nor give a damn what sour old men say.
The sun that sets may rise again, but when our light has sunk into the earth it is gone forever.”

― Catullus

“You think I'm a sissy?
I will sodomize you and face-fuck you.”

― Catullus

Some lioness whelped you on a mountain rock
In Libya, or else you're Scylla's child
Whose womb's all barking dogs, for only a wild
Beast with the nature of a beast could mock
A desperate man making a last appeal
Down on his knees. Bitch heart too hard to feel!

― Catullus, The Complete Poems

From Bukowski's first interview:

Kaye: You look a bit under the weather today.

Bukowski:

I am, yes. This is Sunday evening. It was a tough eight race card. I was 103 ahead at the end of 7. Fifty to win on the eighth. Beaten half a length by a 60-1 shot who should have been canned for cat food years ago, the dog. Anyway, a day of minor profit or prophet led to a night of drunkenness. Awaked by this interviewer. And I'm really going to have to get drunk after you leave, and I'm serious.

Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.

-Rumi

"No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to."

~ Seneca

“Where all was burnt to ash before them no fires were to be had and the nights were long and dark and cold beyond anything they'd yet encountered. Cold to crack the stones. To take your life.”

― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

From Stonecloud Interview 1972 (Bukowski):


STONECLOUD: I'd like to know about your technique at playing the horses.

BUKOWSKI: I come up with a different system every week. The one I'm on now is called basically "consistency plus form" or just common sense. Then in the first race, here's a horse that hasn't won a race in two years, hasn't finished closer than seventh or eighth, been running like a dead lung. It's ten-to-one on the line, it opens at six, it closes at six. I look at the form, I say "Hell, this horse hasn't done anything, slow time, what's all this betting? Sucker bet." It won, it won nicely. Well maybe a neck by the photo.

STONECLOUD: And you bet on it?

BUKOWSKI: No, I didn't, because it wasn't sensible. But, you see, racing works both ways. Sometimes the same kind of horse will get action before the race, and nothing happens. So it's a very mysterious game.

“I was rather fond of her, but I was even fonder of my vices, my mania for running away from everywhere in search of God knows what, driven, I suppose, by stupid pride, by a sense of some sort of superiority.”

― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

"The sanction game is over. It’s only the dying empire of the Federal Reserve, ECB, Wall Street, City of London and their military strong arm operating in the Pentagon that have yet to accept this new reality.

The days of bullying nations and simply bombing them into submission is over as well. Russia and China have made it very clear this is no longer acceptable and Russia has all but shut down the operations in Syria. The “ISIS” boogeyman is surrounded and fleeing into Asia and recently showed up in the Philippines. The fact that a group of desert dwellers acquired an ocean going vessel should be enough evidence to even the most brain-dead these desert dwellers are supported by outside forces – like the CIA. Otherwise, from where did the ship(s) materialize?"

~ Rory Hall, @Sprott Money

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

― George Orwell

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing.

The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise.

Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant.

The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.

And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”


― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward.

That it is permissible to want.

That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse.

That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.

That God — unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both — speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.

That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it's interested in re you.”


― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Why did you leave it so long to go into writing full time, I guess there are a few reasons?

Yes, the drinking. And in between, the bumming between cities, the low-level jobs. I saw little meaning in anything and still have a problem with that. I lived a rather suicidal life, a half-assed life and I met some hard and crazy women. Some of this became material for my later writings.

I mean, I drank. There was a bit of a death scene in a hospital, charity ward. I was spewing blood out of my mouth and my ass but didn't go. Came out and drank some more. Sometimes if you don't care whether you die or not, it can be hard work going.

Then two and one half years as a letter carrier and eleven and a half years as a postal clerk didn't exactly give me a zest for life either. At the age of 50, twenty years ago, I quit my job and decided to become a professional writer, that is, one who gets paid for his scribblings. I figured either that or skidrow. I got lucky. I still am.

- Bukowski

“Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before - more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.”

― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“The rope connecting two men on a mountain is more than nylon protection; it is an organic thing that transmits subtle messages of intent and disposition from man to man; it is an extension of the tactile senses, a psychological bond, a wire along which currents of communication flow.”

― Trevanian, The Eiger Sanction

Morning at the Window


They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.

The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.

- T. S. Eliot

East Coker


In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

- from: East Coker, (The Four Quartets)

Trees


I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.


- Joyce Kilmer

Upon The Mathematics Of The Breath And The Way

I was going to begin this with a little rundown on the female but since the smoke on the local battlefront has cleared a bit I will relent, but there are 50,000 men in this nation who must sleep on their bellies for fear of loosing their parts to women with wild- glazed eyes and knives.

Brothers and sisters, I am 52 and there is a trail of females behind me, enough for 5 men's lives. Some of the ladies have claimed that I have betrayed them for drink; well, I'd like to see any man stick his pecker into a fifth of whiskey. Of course, you can get your tongue in there but the bottle doesn't respond. Well, haha among the trumpets, let's get back to the word.

- Bukowski

I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'

-Muhammad Ali