“There’s nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death. They don’t honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries & they can’t hear it. Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die.” — Buk.

Comments (4)

  1. Melissa Sue wrote::

    also:
    you may not believe it
    but there are people
    who go through life with
    very little
    friction or
    distress.
    they dress well, eat
    well, sleep well.
    they are contented with
    their family
    life.
    they have moments of
    grief
    but all in all
    they are undisturbed
    and often feel
    very good.
    and when they die
    it is an easy
    death, usually in their
    sleep
    -buk.

    Saturday, October 17, 2009 at 11:21 am #
  2. Gala wrote::

    I love him.

    Saturday, October 17, 2009 at 11:26 am #
  3. Melissa Sue wrote::

    Have you read anything by John Fante? Aurturro Bandini will be your new imaginary boyfriend, i swear.

    <>

    Monday, October 19, 2009 at 9:08 am #
  4. Melissa Sue wrote::

    ur website ate my quote for lunch, lol. here it is:

    “And yet Bukowski was hardly the first writer to look at L.A. through this filter. One thinks of his great hero John Fante, whose superlative 1939 novel, “Ask the Dust,” evokes the city in similarly existential terms. It’s no coincidence that decades later, Bukowski was the one who brought Fante’s work to the attention of Martin, or that when Black Sparrow reissued the then-long-out-of-print “Ask the Dust” in 1980, he would write the preface. “Yes, Fante had a mighty effect upon me,” he wrote. “Not long after reading [his] books I began living with a woman. She was a worse drunk than I was and we had some violent arguments, and often I would scream at her, . . . ‘I am Bandini, Arturo Bandini!’”

    Monday, October 19, 2009 at 9:08 am #