I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.
Charles BukowskiRead
the writing of some men is like a vast bridge that carries you over the many things that claw and tear. The Wine of Forever
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that writing can provide an escape from the hardships of life.
Charles Bukowski likens the act of writing to a bridge that allows individuals to traverse the struggles and pains that life presents. It emphasizes the power of literature as a sanctuary and a means to rise above the difficulties that claw at our existence, suggesting that the creativity and expression found within writing can lead to a sense of freedom and transcendence.
Themes
WritingEscapeLiteratureStruggleLife
In practice
Example use cases
When discussing the therapeutic benefits of writing in a workshop.
More from Charles Bukowski
All quotes →when I am feeling low all i have to do is watch my cats and my courage returns
Charles BukowskiRead
The masses are always wrong...Wisdom is doing everything the crowd does not do. All you do is reverse the totality of their learning and you have the heaven they're looking for.
Charles BukowskiRead
I'm going to open another vottle. not a vottle, but a bottle. you open it and I'll drink it. and you try to write as much as I did without falling off of your chair.
Charles BukowskiRead
To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.
Charles BukowskiRead
I lapsed into my pathetic cut-off period. Often with humans, both good and bad, my senses simply shut off, they get tired, I give up. I am polite. I nod. I pretend to understand because I don’t want anybody to be hurt. That is the one weakness that has lead me into the most trouble. Trying to be kind to others I often get my soul shredded into a kind of spiritual pasta. No matter. My brain shuts off. I listen. I respond. And they are too dumb to know that I am not there.
Charles BukowskiRead
Similar quotes
To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheRead
There are no means of finding what either one person or many can do, but by trying - and no means by which anyone else can discover for them what it is for their happiness to do or leave undone
John Stuart MillRead
Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice �out there� calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice �in here� calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.
Thomas MertonRead
Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.
Robert RauschenbergRead
This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.
Lynda BarryRead
Do not repeat after me words that you do not understand. Do not merely put on a mask of my ideas, for it will be an illusion and you will thereby deceive yourself.
Jiddu KrishnamurtiRead