“What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.”

—  Charles Bukowski , book Ham on Rye

Source: Ham on Rye

Last update Dec. 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability." by Charles Bukowski?
Charles Bukowski photo
Charles Bukowski 555
American writer 1920–1994

Related quotes

John Lancaster Spalding photo

“What is greatly desired, but long deferred, gives little pleasure, when at length it is ours, for we have lived with it in imagination until we have grown weary of it, having ourselves, in the meanwhile, become other.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), pp. 180-181

Eleanor H. Porter photo

“Mrs. Snow had lived forty years, and for fifteen of those years she had been too busy wishing things were different to find much time to enjoy things as they were.”

Eleanor H. Porter (1868–1920) American novelist

Works, Pollyanna (1913)

Neal Stephenson photo

“We need brains, is the bottom line," Ivy said. "We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Cleft"
Seveneves (2015), Part Two

Samuel Butler photo

““To be born,” they say, “is a felony--it is a capital crime, for which sentence may be executed at any moment after the commission of the offence. You may perhaps happen to live for some seventy or eighty years, but what is that, compared with the eternity you now enjoy? And even though the sentence were commuted, and you were allowed to live on for ever, you would in time become so terribly weary of life that execution would be the greatest mercy to you.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 19

Xiomara Castro photo

“For 12 years the people resisted, and those 12 years were not in vain. God takes time but doesn't forget. Today the people have made justice.”

Xiomara Castro (1959) First Lady of Honduras

Xiomara Castro (2021) cited in: " Xiomara Castro poised to become first female president of Honduras https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/29/xiomara-castro-declares-victory-in-honduras-presidential-election" in The Guardian, 29 November 2021.

“We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Another year, another year,—
Alas! and must it be
That Time's most dark and weary wheel
Must turn again for me?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

New Year's Eve
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

David Cay Johnston photo

“There is a never-ending struggle against the need for the state to be strong enough to be functional and to have a civilized society, and at the same time, its desire to crush those who stand in the way.”

David Cay Johnston (1948) Investigative journalist and author

David Cay Johnston; How The One Percent Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (Jun 23, 2009)

John Lancaster Spalding photo

“The able have no desire to appear to be so, and this is part of their ability.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 146

Henri Barbusse photo

“In those former times we lived. Now we hardly live any more, since we have lived. They who we were are dead, for we are here.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XIX - Ghosts
Context: In those former times we lived. Now we hardly live any more, since we have lived. They who we were are dead, for we are here. Her glances come to me, but they do not join again the two surviving voids that we are; her look does not wipe out our widowhood, nor change anything. And I, I am too imbued with clear-sighted simplicity and truth to answer "no" when it is "yes." In this moment by my side Marie is like me.
The immense mourning of human hearts appears to us. We dare not name it yet; but we dare not let it not appear in all that we say.

Related topics