Life & Mortality Quote by Charles Bukowski

Bukowski takes three sacred cows - productivity, romance, mortality - and kicks them until they moo in a different key. The line reads like advice, even a pep talk, but it’s really anti-advice: a refusal to let the usual self-help commandments colonize the mind. “Don’t forget” lands like a barroom finger jab. It implies you’ve already been lied to, or worse, you’ve lied to yourself. The imperative isn’t moral; it’s corrective.

“Time is meant to be wasted” flips the modern religion of optimization. Bukowski isn’t praising laziness so much as attacking the fantasy that your minutes can be redeemed into meaning if you just manage them harder. Wasting time becomes a small act of sovereignty - choosing lived experience over the ledger. Then he moves to “love fails”, not as melodrama but as statistical realism. Love, in his universe, isn’t a guarantee of salvation; it’s an unstable transaction between flawed people, often collapsing under need, habit, alcohol, economics, ego.

“Death is useless” is the cruel punchline. Death doesn’t teach, doesn’t resolve, doesn’t even dignify; it simply ends. That bluntness is Bukowski’s ethic: no consoling metaphysics, no narrative polish. The subtext is oddly liberating. If time isn’t a resource to hoard, love isn’t a permanent shelter, and death isn’t a meaningful finale, then the pressure to perform a “proper” life evaporates. What’s left is the gritty Bukowski mandate: keep going, keep watching, keep writing - not because it adds up, but because you’re here.