"Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it." -Woody Allen

"In order to have wise use of technology, we must have wise human beings -- and these have always been in limited supply."
--Isaac Asimov at Cornell University, 27 April 1976

"Silence overcame all. Only the moon, clasping in her blue hands her round, bright, carefree face, wandered like a vagrant outside the window" ~Crossing into Poland ~Isaac Babel

"I can see the wounds of your god oozing seed, a fragrant poison to intoxicate virgin"~Crossing Into Poland ~Isaac Babel

A charitable bank conceals the mist of sorrow; I have nothing more to ask of the heavens than that I be left to dream ~Baudelaire

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god. -Jorge Luis Borge

"'Lydia sex isn't everything! You are obsessed. For Christ's sake, give it a rest.'
'A rest until your leg heals? How am I going to make it meanwhile?'
'I'll play scrable with you.'
Lydia screamed. The car began to swerve all over the street. 'YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH I'LL KILL YOU!'" ~Charles Bukowski ~Women

"Her one drink and had Cecilia giggling and talking and she was explaining that animals had souls too. Nobody challenged her opinion. It was possible, we knew. What we weren't sure of was if we had any" ~Charles Bukowski ~Women

"Don't expect too
much of Humanity
they have been
practicing hatred
for centuries,
it passed down
refined and
perfected,
oh, they have become
very good at that-
their hatreds blossom
with ever more frequent
with ever more frequent
regularity.
our public hell creates a
private hell and
there is no hell
except on
earth" ~Charles Bukowski ~A note on the masses.

"Perfection in the stars
where love died" ~Charles Bukowski ~Big Night on the Town

"we've got it right
we've got it right-
the raven and the waves
the tired and the sunsets and the tired
people-
it takes a lifetime to die and
no time at
all. ~Charles Bukowski ~16 Jap Machine Gun Bullets

"...you like a butcher knife against my throat
as the nightingale sings elsewhere while laughter
mingles with the roach's hiss." ~Charles Bukowski ~I know you

"in other words
magic persists
without us
no matter what
we may try to do
to spoil it." ~Charles Bukowski ~in other words

"a psychiatrist won't
help,
a psychologist won't
help,
a god won't
help.
drinking's old
and drugs make it
worse" ~Charles Bukowski ~cruising

Then I laid on my back awhile
and I shot out the stars one by one
and then
I show out the moon
and then I walked around
and shot out every light
in town,
and pretty soon it began to get dark
real dark
the way I like it
just can't stand to sleep
with no light shinin'
on my face" ~Charles Bukowski ~What a man I was

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 or 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. - Charles Bukowski

"And even then he made the critics look like schoolboys raising their hands for permission to take a literary pee pee" -Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

"Only a few lone partridges will remember the roll of the dice and the way the walls smiled that night" -Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

"Nobody ever loses their souls, they just piss away 99/100ths of them" -Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

"Examining your own mind is the worst thing a crazy person can do" -Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

"Did you consider that LSD and color TV arrived for our consumption at the same time? Here comes all this explorative color pounding and what do we do? We outlaw one and completely fuck up the other" -Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

she has saves me
from everything that is
not here. ~The 6 foot goddess ~Love is a Dog from Hell ~Charles Bukowski

don't underss my love
you might find a mannequin;
don't underss the mannequin
you might find
my love.

she's long ago
forgotten me.

she's trying on a new
hat
and looks more the
coquette
than ever.

she is a
child
and a mannequin
and
death.

I can't hate
that.

she didn't do
anything
unusual.

I only wanted her
to. ~trapped ~Love is a Dog from Hell ~Charles Bukowski

love dries up, I thought
as I walked back to the
bathroom, even faster
than sperm. ~The end of a short affair ~Love is a Dog from Hell ~Charles Bukowski

and if you have the ability to love
love yourself first
but always be aware of the possibility of
total defeat
whether the reason for that defeat
seems right or wrong-

an early taste of death is not necessarily
a bad thing.

stay out of churches and bars and museums,
and like the spider be
patient-
times is everybody's cross,
plus
exile
defeat
treachery

all that dross.

stay with the beer.

beer is continuos blood.

a continuous blood. ~how to be a great writer ~Love is a Dog from Hell ~Charles Bukowski

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but they keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate

nobody ever finds the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills. ~alone with everybody ~Love is a Dog from Hell ~Charles Bukowski

my hands dead
my heart dead
silence
adagio of rocks
the world ablaze
that's the best
for me. ~the worst and the best ~Love is a Dog from Hell ~Charles Bukowski

think of the beds
used again and again
to fuck in
to die in.

in this land
some of us fuck more than
we die
but most of us die
better then we
fuck,
and we die
piece by piece too-
in parks
eating ice cream, or
in igloos
of dementia,
or on straw mats
or upon disembarked
loves
or
or. ~beds, toilets, you and me- ~Love is a Dog from Hell ~Charles Bukowski

too much
too little

too fat
too thin
or nobody.

laughter or
tears

lovers
haters

strangers with faces like
the backs of
thumb tacks

armies running through
streets of blood
waving winebottles
bayonetting and fucking
virgins.

or an old guy in a cheap room
with a photograph of M. Monroe.

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

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to ~the cruch ~Love is a Dog from Hell ~Charles Bukowski

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself. - Sir Richard Francis Burton

in that clarity traversed by birds
that sometimes-fragility made more fragile by birds

one morning I remembered words I spoke long ago
I saw my descent in the eyes of a bird

she was patient she was fragile
she was drowning in the circling shadows of birds

that summer my hands changed from a boy's to a man's
my shoulders no longer housed the wings of a bird

I wanted to find something a feeling a word
but sin gripped me there a man flown over by birds
~Denver Butson (first line by Eugenio de Andrade), "Drowning Ghazal"

if a shadow were to gutter in the wind of flesh
if the night were to burn in a falling away of flesh

if after you forgot my voice you forgot my footstep
if you could not even recall later the scent of my flesh

if you dreamed of anything besides drowning
the bluing then greying then yellowing of you flesh

if you had waited for me like you said you would
would you recognize me now in this costume of flesh

if yesterday's forgotten verbs would follow today's nouns
would our skeletons still drape themselves in such abjective flesh
~Denver Butson (first line by Pefro Salinas), "Drowning Ghazal"

"I'm sorry you never loved me more
I'm sorry I never took you dancing" ~Denver Butson

Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. - Chapman Cohen

"I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat." ~Joseph Conrad

"pity this busy monster, humankind,
not.
progress is a comfortable disease"
-e.e. Cummings

"Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death" ~E.E. Cummings ~Buffalo Bill's

why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead" ~E.E. Cummings ~next to of course god america i

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true, for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine. ~Charles Darwin

`Because,' said Scrooge, `a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!' ~A Christmas Carol ~Charles Dickens

Instead of all of this energy and effort directed at the war to end drugs, how about a little attention to drugs which will end war? ~My first impression of the USA, 1921 ~Albert Einstein

Hell is oneself, Hell is alone, the other figures in it, merely projections. -T. S. Eliot

God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. - Empedocles

I cannot concieve otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no worship or praise from us, but that He is even infintely above it. - Benjamin Franklin

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep" ~Robert Frost ~Stopping by woods on a snowy evening

God does not play dice with the universe: He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players,* to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time. * i.e., everbody. ~Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens

"That was what some humans found so hard to understand. Hell wasn't a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowley's opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just opposite sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind."~Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchet ~Good Omens

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei

"Let's not talk about how I am. That's a subject I know too much about to want to think about any more" -Ernest Hemmingway, A Way You'll Never Be

I had a dream my life would be different from this hell I am living, so different from what it seemed. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed. -Victor Hugo

Maybe this world is another planet's hell. -Aldous Huxley

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex - Aldous Huxley

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored - Aldous Huxley

"Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?" ~Aldous Huxley

I have examined all the known superstitions of the word, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth. - Thomas Jefferson

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window. - Stephen King

"The Most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignoarnce in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age"
~H.P. Lovecraft, *The Call Of Cthulu*

...they did not know that beauty lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life has no standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony with the dreams and the feelings which have gone before and blindly moulded our little spheres out of the rest of chaos. They did not see that good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective... ~h.p. lovecraft

Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. -Karl Marx

It's not what you say, its how you say it" ~Arthur Miller ~Death of a Salesmen

"Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven." ~John Milton ~Paradise Lost

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." ~Vladimir Nabokov

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." - Napoleon

I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty -- I call it the one mortal blemish of mankind. - Friedrich Nietzsche

"One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly." ~Friedrich Nietzsche

"Under the spreading chesnut tree
I sold you and you sold me-" ~George Orwell, "1984"

Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings. - George Orwell

"Egotist: a person more interested in himself than me." ~Ambrose Pierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"The Soul Shall Find Itself Alone 'Mid Dark Thoughts Of The Gray Tombstone. Not One, Of All The Crowd, To Pry Into Thine Hour Of Secrecy. Be Silent In That Solitude, Which Is Not Loneliness, For Then The Spirits Of The Dead Who Stood In Life Before Thee, Are Again In Death Around Thee, And Their Will Shall Overshadow Thee: Be Still. The Night, Though Clear Shall Frown, & The Stars Shall Look Not Down, From Their High Thrones In The Heaven, With Light Like Hope To Mortals Given." - Edgar Allan Poe

"The inherent problem with growing up is that you stop growing" -Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Cockroaches are your gods. You are weak. You should pray to them.
They are more perfect than you. You are fucked up with your idiot idiosyncrasies.
You have analyst, tranquilizers, you need vactaions, you start wars, you commit suicide,
you steal, you lie, you cheat. You are weak.
You cannot survive, you are too busy hauling around that big brain of yours.
You have to build jails to keep your own kind from killing you.
You kill everything. You live in dear.
You could never live with the simplicity and beauty of the roach.
You have abortions. You engage in meaningless activity.
You are weak, cockroaches are your gods. Give up your plate of food to them.
You're not even fit to kiss the smooth belly scales of the mother roach.
You are repulsed by them, you fear them. There are more of them than there are of you.
You get squeamish at just the sight, they make you sick. You are weak.
Cockroaches are your gods. Give up your plate of food to them.
Whether you do or not, they will survive you and your stupidity.
You try to kill them with gas and poison just like you do your own kind.
The roach comes back, stronger, faster, immune.
You watch television, you lock your doors to protect yourself from your species.
You put needles in your arms, you sell your bodies,
you find new and inventive ways to mutilate yourselves and others.
You are weak. Cockroaches are your gods. ~Henry Rollins, "The First Five"

Why do people allow themselves to be compromised?
Why will they give themselves away again and again?
Why are those who stand up forthemselves shunned, scorned and hated?
Fear. Fear of being alone. Fear of being.
Years and years of opportunity to teach themselves was never allowed.
They can read and write but they can't walk through their front door.
They fear and hate themselves. They are strangers to themselves.
They see their feelings and desires, what they truly fell inside, as the enemy. ~Henry Rollins, "The First Five"

I used to love you
I still do
So selfish
I love the old you
The you that doesnt shoot drugs
The you that didn't get bear on by men
You laugh in my face, and call me a fool
But it's true
I still love you
Sometimes, I can see the old you
When your eyes flash
When you look almost alive ~Henry Rollins, "The First Five"

"If i had a penny for every tear of yours, I would buy this apartment and give it to you.
So you could have your own place to be so damn sad." ~Henry Rollins, "The First Five"

Memories don't hurt like they used to
Last year they cut and burned
It was my fault
I would go back and check on my memories
Like they were some kind of investment
When I would return to these places
These people
I became lost inside
I think people fear the fact that all things pass
All of a sudden
You find that you should have left the party a long time ago
All the great things that happened
Come back to make you feel crummy
You have to let go or otherwise you get dragged
So many ways to burn out ~Henry Rollins, "The First Five"

I'm ok but my heart is stupid
It goes places that I would never go
I have a leash that I keep it on
Doesn't allways work
Never learns from pain
Stupid ~Henry Rollins, "The First Five"

"There's no such thing as friendship. You just get what you need when you need it as fast as you can. The only reason people give is so they can take later on." ~Get in the van ~2.5.83 ~Henry Rollins

"Destroyed by the eyes of the world" ~Get in the van ~Henry Rollins

"Orginizations are evil. Unity is evil. Only a cowardly idiot would align himself with a unified faction." ~Get in the van ~4.18.84 ~Henry Rollins

"The end must never leave your sight. Complete destruction must be had." ~Get in the van ~4.18.84 ~Henry Rollins

The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind. - Marquis de Sade

Hell is other people. -Jean-Paul Sartre

"We are not at war, we are having a nervous breakdown" ~Hunter S. Thompson ~Kingdom of Fear

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them" -Thoreau

"O for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a backbone you cannot pass your hand through. Our statistics are at fault: the population has returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one." -Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

"Never let school get in the way of education" -Mark Twain

Most people are bothered by those passages in Scripture which they cannot understand; but as for me, I always notice that the passages in Scripture which trouble me most are those which I do understand. - Mark Twain

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets." ~Voltaire ~War

If God did not exist, it would be necessary for man to invent him. - Voltaire

"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing" ~Kurt Vonnegut~Cat's Cradle

"It appeared to the Elders that the people here would beieve anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed and expiriment. They put the idea into Earthling's heads that the whole universe had been created by one big male animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on thrones forever because they were such good relatives of the creator." ~Kurt Vonnegut ~Hocus Pocus

"The Elders made us think that the Creator on the big throne hated strangers just as much as we did, and that we would be doing him a big favor if we tried to exterminate them by any and all means possible.
That went over big down here." ~Kurt Vonnegut ~Hocus Pocus

Anyone who cannot understand how a useful religion can be based on lies will not understand this book either.- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle"

"Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be" -Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

"Better to recognize hate than imagine love" -Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

"Those who write on heaven's walls
should roll their shit in little balls
and those who read these lines of wit
should eat these little balls of shit"
-Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap. ~Kurt Vonnegut

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquesting faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying. - Kurt Vonnegut

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.- Kurt Vonnegut

"If every cigarette you smoke takes 7 minutes off of your life, then every game of Dungeons and Dragons you play delays the loss of your virginity by 7 hours." - Brian Warner, a.k.a Marilyn Manson

Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief. - Oscar Wilde

As I was out buying a quart of milk the other day, the leadership of Czechoslovakia's Communist Party fell from power. ~Writing 101 textbook (example of a good sentence)