16 QUOTES FROM THE NOVEL “WOMEN” BY THE FIRED CYNIC CHARLES BUKOVSKY

Charles Bukowski about life and women

Ecology of life. Inspiration: We bring to your attention artistic reflections on life and women from one of the most witty and straightforward writers of the 20th century - Charles Bukowski.

We bring to your attention artistic reflections on life and women from one of the most witty and straightforward writers of the 20th century - Charles Bukowski.

“Women... I like the colors of their clothes; the way they walk; cruelty in some persons; from time to time there is almost pure beauty in some other face, absolutely and bewitchingly feminine. They have this advantage over us: they plan much better and are better organized. While men are watching football, or drinking beer, or hanging out at the bowling alleys, they, these women, are thinking about us, focusing, studying, deciding whether to accept us, throw us out, trade us, kill us, or simply abandon us. But what difference does it make: no matter what they do, we end up alone and mad.”

“I am a loner by nature, I am content simply to live with a woman, eat with her, sleep with her, walk down the street with her.”

“The beginning of a relationship is always the easiest. Afterwards the veils begin to fall off, and it never ends.”

“Human relationships in general are strange. I mean, you're with one person for a while, eating with him, and sleeping with him, and living with him, loving him, talking with him, going everywhere, and then it stops. There comes a short period when you are with no one, then another woman arrives, and now you eat with her and fuck her, and all this seems normal, as if you were just waiting for her, and she was waiting for you.”

“However, women - good women - frightened me, because in the end they demanded my whole soul, and I wanted to save what was left of my soul.”

“Many things struck me: women’s shoes under the bed; a lonely hairpin forgotten on the chest of drawers; the way they say: “I’m going to go pee...”; ribbons in hair; when you walk with them along the boulevard at half past one in the afternoon - just two people walking together; long nights with drinking and cigarettes, talking; disputes; thoughts of suicide; when you eat together and you feel good; jokes, laughter for no reason; a sense of wonder in the air; when together in a car in a parking lot; when you compare past loves at 3 am; when they tell you that you snore, and you hear her snoring; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death, and sometimes divorce, but you always continue, you always see it through to the end; you read the newspaper alone in a sandwich shop, and you're sick of the fact that she's now married to a dentist with an IQ of 95; racetracks, parks, picnics in parks; even prisons; her boring friends, your boring friends; you drink, she dances; you flirt, she flirts; her wheels, your ***s are on the side, and she does the same; when you sleep together..."

“A man needs a lot of women only when they are all no good. A man can completely lose his personality if he waves his horseradish around too much.”

“Some men tried to catch her eye, but she stayed close to me, taking my arm. Very few beautiful women strive to show in public that they belong to someone. I knew them enough to understand this. I accepted them as they were, but love came difficult and very rarely.”

“Kissing is a more intimate activity than fucking. That's why I never liked my girlfriends going around kissing men. It would be better if they fucked them.”

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PS And remember, just by changing your consumption, we are changing the world together! © econet

Here's to the lovely ladies! "Women" by Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski was "fresh beyond his years." I immediately apologize for the quote from Shufutinsky, but it conveys the essence of the work very well - Charles Bukowski’s alter ego Henry Chinaski was very fond of drinking and women. More than once I had the idea of ​​counting how many partners Chinaski had throughout the novel “Women ,” but I threw it away just as Henry threw out another mistress from his life. It felt like there were several dozen of them. Behind almost every partner in the novel lies a real story from Bukowski’s life.

Chinaski easily and simply met the opposite sex - he did it in bars, at parties, but mainly at poetry readings. Almost every evening visitor was ready to sleep with him - he read so inspiredly and charismatically. It was not always possible to remember all the lines and not swallow the words, but this even spurred the crowd on. Before them appeared the same Henry Chinaski from the books they revered: a drunkard, a drunkard and a womanizer. Any beauty was ready to give herself to this fat old man with bad skin, because he writes so well.

One of the greatest tragedies in a man’s life unfolds on the pages of the novel. It would seem that you are a talented and popular writer in underground circles; there are many attractive girls among your admirers. You can have them in any quantity and several at once. But the problem is that Chinaski, like many men, um, how can I put it in a more literary way... is an amorous person and is susceptible to dependence on women.

For some reason, we can’t just sleep with some people and forget about them; for some reason they hook us and we begin to ***** suffer. The first woman to appear in the novel, Lydia Vance, hooked Henry first with her gorgeous ass, and subsequently with her craziness and aggressiveness. Indeed, such a woman can greatly captivate a man and diversify his boring life with “interesting competitions.”

He and Lydia often got drunk and quarreled terribly: she trashed his apartment, threw out things and crashed his car. Chinaski loved to tell her about his adventures on the side, which inflamed her even more. He was in love with Lydia and constantly returned to her. It was a classic destructive relationship that caused pain to both participants, but it is precisely this kind of relationship that can draw you in and make it very difficult to get out of this swamp. It is not surprising that almost a third of the book is devoted to the relationship with Lydia.

The good news is that Chinaski was still able to get out of this swamp; he was completely fed up with it. My applause! But is this the end of the “interesting competitions”? No, everything was just beginning. Then the flow of women ending the evening in his bed only increases. A lady from the music industry, a lady who looks like Katharine Hepburn (what a miracle!), two tourists from Germany, ladies picked up at numerous poetry readings and bars, and many, many others. Reading about all this is very exciting. Bukowski writes in a restrained, neat style. Brutal and merciless. This is the style for me.

And since we mentioned bars, let’s dwell a little on this topic. Chinaski truly and truly loved drinking. As Bukowski himself said, he started drinking at the age of thirteen. Alcohol gave him a feeling of freedom. For a while, he forgot that he was just a sad teenager, covered in multiple boils and subjected to systematic beatings from his own father. Chinaski drank terribly. He could drink a dozen beers at a time and pour vodka on top. It seems like there wasn't a day that he didn't drink. I woke up around noon and started right away. He drank with his women, neighbors and himself.

A whirlwind of alcohol and women completely sucks him in. Chinaski wants to try everyone, and it seems that he is no longer suffering. One life is not enough for all this, especially if you started when you are already over fifty. However, the old man does not calm down.

Something changes with the appearance of Sarah in his life. Henry finds kindness and compassion in her. He is also impressed by her intelligence. “Sarah looked good in my eyes. If she opened her mouth, she spoke witty and caustic. Good brains." But there was one “but”. Sarah was a follower of Dreyer Baba (apparently based on the neo-Hindu religious leader and guru Sai Baba). Dreyer Baba, among other things, forbade sex before marriage. So Henry had to be content with only petting, which, of course, did not suit him. “The kinder ones fuck better, in fact, and after being with them for a while, you find that they are beautiful, because they are beautiful anyway. I thought about Sarah - there’s just that in her. If only it weren’t for this Dreyer Baba, with the damned STOP sign in his hands.”

It seems that “that something” was precisely what Chinaski was actually looking for in all these countless women. He wanted to try them all, but he really only needed one. It should be mentioned that Sarah was based on Bukowski's third and final wife and widow, née Linda Lee Begley, who actually worked at a health food diner. Kindness, wit and tenderness were the quiet haven where the old fat libertine Chinaski/Bukowski landed, after which he no longer responded to letters and offers from his sexy fans.

Quotes about life

Charles Bukowski's quotes about ordinary life are striking in their sharpness and causticity. However, this is precisely what gives a special zest to all statements.

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All these thoughts were born to me because I am surrounded by poets and sycophants who have nothing to say about themselves except that they are all weaklings and selfish.

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It's good to be surrounded by a whole bunch of cats. After all, when you feel bad, you just look at the cat. And the cat knows and understands everything. She sees everything and sees it as it really is.

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She smiled the saddest smile I've ever seen.

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We don't even ask to be happy anymore. All we're asking for is a little less pain.

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I never expected every person to be a genius. But the crowd of people who rushed into idiocy surprised me more than ever.

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I'm sitting here simply because there's nothing there but stupidity. This stupidity is everywhere. Dumb people hang out with other dumb people. Well, let them sit and dumb each other down.

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True beauty lies in character, not in the shape of your eyebrows.

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With my view of the world, it is best to avoid all communication with people. The fewer people I meet along the way, the better I feel.

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To be able to simply live until you die is already difficult.

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Poverty and lack of education generate their own truth.

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If you are drunk, the world, as before, is somewhere nearby. Only now he doesn't choke you.

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Depressive moods and suicide are often the result of an unhealthy diet.

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There are days when the most correct decision is not to get out of bed, having first pulled the blanket over your head.

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If you can’t be a gentleman, be so kind as to at least not be a pig.

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There will always be someone to ruin your day. And it happens that throughout my life.

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If you are a bastard, say so right away. If you don't say it, someone else will. But if you confess yourself, they will all be disarmed.

Bukowski Quotes

Prepared by: Dmitry Sirotkin

I present to you a selection of quotes from the American writer Charles Bukowski (1920 - 1994).

Almost all of his works are autobiographical in nature, usually written while drunk, and belong to the genre of “black realism.”

Quotes are summarized by topic: life ethics, women and men, people, life, about yourself, relationships, writers, human manifestations, love, drinking, talent, loneliness, sex, beauty, TV, body parts, Christmas, politics.

About life ethics

It's good to have somewhere to go when things are bad.

To be above good and evil is nothing in theory, but in order to live on, you still need to choose...

The whole problem was that you had to choose between one evil and another. The results of the choice did not matter at all, they still took you by the gills and had them to the fullest; by the age of twenty-five, most people had already become complete cretins.

I don't believe that you can change the world for the better. I believe that you can try not to make it worse.

To start saving the world, you need to save each person individually, one by one; saving everyone is romanticism or politics.

The more rivers you cross, the more you know about rivers - that is, if you have experienced both rapids and rapids. And that can be pretty cool sometimes.

If you have almost no soul left and you know about it, then you still have a soul.

Potential doesn't mean anything. This must be done.

There are days when it's best to stay in bed and pull the covers over your head.

One joy is listening to your neighbors. This helps you understand that you are not the only one who has been knocked down, that you are not the only one who has gone crazy.

My favorite day is Monday. Everyone returns to work, and no one is an eyesore.

Who wants to stay where they don't want them?

I don't look at people too much. It gets in the way. If you look at someone for a long time, you begin to become like him. People... For the most part, I can do without them. They empty me, not the other way around. I have no respect for any person. Because of this I have problems...

No one can ever be quite sure of what they will do.

When I see a person with a clean apartment, I know that something is wrong with him. And if it’s too clean, then he’s a ***.

If you can't be a gentleman, at least don't be a pig.

If you're a brute, say so. Otherwise someone else will say. But if I speak first, they are disarmed.

About women and men

All women are different. Basically they seem to be a combination of the best and the worst - both magical and terrible. I'm glad they exist, though.

While men are watching professional football, or drinking beer, or hanging out at the bowling alley, they, these women, are thinking about us, focusing, studying, deciding whether to accept us, throw us out, trade us, kill us, or simply abandon us. In the end, it hardly matters; no matter what they do, we end up lonely and mad.

When a woman turns against you, forget about her. They can love, but then something inside them turns upside down. And they can calmly watch you die in a ditch, hit by a car, and they don’t care about you.

Women: I like the colors of their clothes; the way they walk; cruelty in some persons; every now and then pure beauty in some face, absolutely and bewitchingly feminine. Many things struck me: women's shoes under the bed; a lonely hairpin forgotten on the chest of drawers; the way they say: “I’m going to go pee”; ribbons in hair; when you walk with them along the boulevard at half past one in the afternoon - just two people walking together; long nights of drinking and cigarettes, talking...

Very few beautiful women strive to show in public that they belong to someone.

How many good men ended up under a bridge because of a woman.

If I had been born a woman, I would probably have become a prostitute. Since I was born a man, I desired women constantly - the lower the better. However, women—good women—frightened me because, in the end, they demanded my whole soul, and I wanted to save what was left of me.

A man needs a lot of women only when they are all no good. A man can completely lose his personality if he waves his horseradish around too much.

By the way, quotes about women and quotes about men

About people

Each person has his own personal hell, and more than one.

Whatever you give to the human race, it will scratch, shred and crap.

What boring people. All over the earth. And they reproduce by budding. A stinking menagerie. The earth is teeming with them.

Some people don't know how to go crazy - they have terribly boring lives.

What happened to one happened to most of us. Our lives were not so different from each other - although we liked to think that they were not.

The longer you know people, the more noticeable their eccentricities become. Sometimes eccentricities are funny - at the very beginning.

A good person is hard to find these days.

People are usually much better in writing than in reality. In this sense, they are very similar to poets.

Kissing for the first time, having sex for the first time - there is something dramatic about it. At first people are interesting. Over time, slowly but surely, all the inferiority, all the madness is revealed. I mean less and less to them, they mean less and less to me.

Poverty and ignorance produce their own truth.

By the way, quotes about people

About life

Someone will always ruin your day, or even your whole life.

Unlucky day. And a week. And a month. And a year. And life. Damn her.

There will always be something that wants to ruin our lives. It all depends on what or who meets first. However, you must always be prepared for a meeting.

It’s very sad, everything is very sad - we live our whole lives like idiots and in the end we die.

Just living until you die is hard work.

There is too much cold in the world. If only people could agree on everything, things would be different.

You wake up in the morning, crawl out from under the blankets, sit on the bed and think: damn it, what’s next?

It seemed that when you remove the stress and madness from everyday life, it was as if there was nothing else to rely on.

Nothing is ever configured. People just blindly grab whatever comes to hand: communism, healthy food, Zen, surfing, ballet, hypnosis, ... - and then it all evaporates and falls apart. People need to find something to do while waiting to die.

The problem with this world is that educated people are full of doubts, and idiots are full of confidence.

Things were going well, but nobody knows where.

By the way, quotes about life

About Me

“Humanity, you screwed up from the start.” That's my motto.

I'm usually bad, but when I'm good, I'm good as hell.

It’s all my childhood’s fault, you know. I never knew what love was...

I'm like a spoiled high school student. Yes, I’m worse than any b...i; b...b only takes your money and nothing else. I play with lives and souls as if they were my toys. How can I call myself a human? How can I write poetry? What am I made of?

I don't like laws, rules, religion and morals. I will not allow society to reshape me in its own way.

When I was younger, I was constantly depressed. But now suicide no longer seemed like a viable option. At my age there is very little left to kill. It's good to be old, no matter what they say.

About relationships

People owe each other a certain loyalty, or something, even if they are not married. In a sense, trust must go even deeper precisely because it is not sanctified by law.

The beginning of a relationship is always the easiest. Afterwards the covers begin to fall off, and it never ends.

Human relationships don't work anyway. Only in the first two weeks there is some kind of buzz, then the participants lose all interest. The masks fall off, and real people peek through: psychopaths, imbeciles, obsessed, vengeful...

I always liked visiting women myself more than having them visit me. You can always get away from them.

The most one could hope for in a relationship between two people, I decided, was two and a half years.

Everything good that was in our relationship was like a rat stomping around my stomach and gnawing at my insides.

When I'm drunk and she's crazy, we're almost equal to each other.

Kissing is a more intimate activity than fucking. That's why I never liked my girlfriends going around kissing men. It would be better if they fucked them.

About the writers

Writers are desperate people, and when they have hope, they stop being writers.

Lawyers, doctors and dentists rip people off completely. Writers are left to starve, commit suicide, or go crazy.

The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, much less several other writers. Like flies on the same poop.

An intellectual talks about a simple thing in a complex way; an artist describes a complex thing in simple words.

If what a writer wrote was published and sold in many, many copies, the writer considered himself great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold averagely, the writer considered himself great. If what a writer wrote was never published at all, and he did not have the money to print it himself, then he considered himself truly great.

It’s easy to write about ***s, but writing about a good woman is disproportionately more difficult.

In my mind I could invent men because I was one myself, but it is almost impossible to literaryize women without first getting to know them properly.

About human manifestations

Everyone imagines themselves to be special, privileged, exceptional. Even the ugly old pepper shaker watering the geraniums on the porch.

Unhappiness for me is being in a crowd. Being in a crowd of people and listening to their conversations. This can drive you crazy. These conversations are the conversations of crazy people. Even dogs speak better. People without morals often consider themselves freer, but they mainly lack the ability to feel or love.

There are such people - immediately after the first meeting you begin to despise them.

My friend William is a happy man - he lacks imagination to suffer.

Show me a lonely person who, while living on his own, keeps his kitchen in order, and in 8 cases out of 9 I will prove that he has a disgusting character.

I tried to convince myself that guilt was just some kind of disease. That it is people who make progress in life without guilt. People who can lie, deceive, people who always know how to cut corners.

About love

Love is normal for those who can cope with mental overload. Of course, you can love a person - if you don't know him too closely.

Find what you love and let it kill you.

I know my shortcomings too well to demand reciprocal love.

Love is for guitarists, Catholics and chess maniacs.

By the way, quotes about love

About drinking

Drinking is a form of suicide where you are allowed to go back to life and start all over again the next day.

When you're drunk, the world is still out there, but at least it's not holding you by the throat.

If something bad happens, you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens, you drink to celebrate; if nothing happens, you drink to make something happen.

- I think I need a drink. “Almost everyone needs a drink, but they don’t know about it.”

About talent

At 25, anyone can be a genius. At 50 something needs to be done for this.

Ambition rarely helps talent. Another thing is luck. Talent always follows on her heels.

If you lie to a person about his talent just because he is sitting opposite him, it will be the most unforgivable lie of all, because it is tantamount to saying: go ahead, continue, and this, in the end, is the worst way to waste the life of a person without true talent . However, many people do just that - friends and relatives, mainly.

About loneliness

Loneliness strengthens me; Without him I’m like without food and water. Every day without him weakens me. I'm not proud of my loneliness, but I depend on it.

I always feel uneasy being alone; sometimes it’s good, but never on its own.

With my outlook on life, the first thing is to avoid communicating with people. The fewer of them I come across, the better I feel.

By the way, quotes about loneliness

About sex

If you want to drink, drink; if you want to get laid, throw the bottle away.

There is a lot of puritanism in me. And the Puritans enjoy sex more than anyone else.

All we do is sleep, eat, lie around, and fuck. Like slugs. Slime love, that's what it's called.

About beauty

Beauty is nothing. You yourself don’t understand how lucky you are that you are ugly, because if people like you, then you know that it’s something else.

There is no such thing as beauty, especially in the human face, in what we call physiognomy. This is all a calculated and imaginary adjustment. Like, if the nose doesn’t stick out too much, the sides are fine, if the ears aren’t too big, if the hair is long... This is a mirage of generalization. People think that certain faces are beautiful, but in fact they are not, mathematically equal to zero. True “beauty”, of course, comes from character, and not from what shape your eyebrows are.

By the way, quotes about beauty

About TV

Seeing all sorts of crap on the screen has become so commonplace that people no longer realize that they are watching crap.

“The first thing I liked about you,” said Lydia, “is that you don’t have a TV.”

About body parts

Legs are the first thing for me. This is the first thing I saw when I was born. But then I tried to get out. Since then I have been trying to do the opposite, but without much success.

She got up and walked out. Never in my life have I seen such a butt. It defies description. Doesn't give in to anything. Don't bother me now. I want to think about him.

About Christmas

Take Christmas for example. Yeah, get him the hell out of here.

Why kill so many Christmas trees to celebrate one single birthday?

About politics

The rest of us will be fine until the poor people learn how to make atomic bombs in their basements.

The difference between dictatorship and democracy is as follows: democracy - first we vote, then we listen. Dictatorship - don’t waste precious time on useless voting.

By the way, quotes about politics

About miscellaneous

God is a hook in the sky.

Bad taste is used a million times more than good taste.

Depression and suicide were often the result of poor diet.

Any fool can carve out some work for himself: on the contrary, only a wise person can do without it.

As can be seen from the above quotes, Charles Bukowski had a wealth of life experience , albeit somewhat specific. You probably need to have considerable talent and determination to become a famous writer while being “at the bottom.”

Quotes about Bukowski

• D. Calonne: Ideologies, slogans, bigotry were his enemies, and he refused to belong to any group, be it beatniks, confessors, Black Mountain, democrats, republicans, capitalists, communists, hippies, punks. Bukowski documented his deepest psychological and spiritual suffering in his own inimitable style.
• D. Newlove: On the human level, despite his quarrelsome, quarrelsome and quarrelsome nature, there was always absolute clarity of mind and control of the mind, as well as such an endearing good nature, courage and generosity that he was called “the only truly beloved poet of the underground” .
• D. Bykov: They love him for the same thing they love Dovlatov for - for the opportunity to relate themselves to the image of a far from triumphant, far from successful, rather sad author. "Dirty old men need love too." We are all, in some sense, dirty old men, even if we are twenty. Therefore, it seems to me that Bukowski gives the reader this opportunity to quite joyfully, in a sense, comfortingly relate himself to the hero. He doesn't show off. He talks honestly about his problems. Another thing is that, like Dovlatov, he is still a little touched by himself, and this makes his reading far from being so healing.

Next, you can move on to other collections of quotes:

• Hemingway quotes
• Nabokov quotes
• Dovlatov quotes
• Stephen King quotes
• Pelevin quotes
• Mark Twain quotes

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"Women"

One of the writer’s most famous works was the novel “Women.” Charles Bukowski's book consists of many intimate scenes that the main character goes through. Admiring a woman, the main character begins to idolize and deify the opposite sex. The ladies, changing one after another in his bed, amaze the protagonist with their beauty.

Every woman is unique and charming in her own way. This is exactly what Charles Bukowski writes about. Showing all sides of the female soul and pointing out the shortcomings, the writer simultaneously writes about all the beautiful things that exist in the female sex. The author himself says that some women's weaknesses should be forgiven and only laughed at, and not ridiculed and humiliated because of this by the beloved.

Books

Based on the quotes, you can get an idea of ​​the work of a person like Charles Bukowski. His books, both ironic and frank, captivate the soul of every reader. Here are a few works by this writer:

• "Bread with Ham";
• "Post office";
• "Factotum";
• "Hollywood";
• "Waste paper";
• "The first beauty in the city";
• "South without signs of the North";
• "Stories of Ordinary Madness";
• “Notes of an Old Goat”;
• "Music of hot water";
• “Sun, here I am. Interview";
• “The path to heaven is closed”;
• “From a wine-stained notebook”;
• “How the dead love.”