Wit & Attitude Quote by Charles Bukowski

Bukowski’s heaven-and-hell shrug lands like a barstool punchline with a bruise underneath. The setup sounds like a folk aphorism, but the turn is pure Bukowski: not belief replaced with a better belief, just belief discarded as another nagging human habit. Animals don’t “worry” about the metaphysical because they can’t; Bukowski doesn’t because he refuses. That’s the key distinction. He’s not claiming enlightenment, he’s claiming abdication - a deliberate opting out of the moral bookkeeping that religion (and polite society) uses to keep people compliant.

The subtext is less “animals are pure” than “humans are sick with anxiety”. Heaven and Hell function here as symbols for all the invisible courts we submit to: bosses, reputations, guilt, self-improvement regimes, the constant grading of a life. By pairing himself with animals, Bukowski sidesteps the sanctimony of spirituality and the performative self-consciousness of modern living. It’s a small alliance with the non-judging world: dogs, cats, horses - creatures that don’t narrate their own failures.

Context matters. Bukowski wrote from the underside of American optimism: skid-row jobs, alcoholism, bad luck, and the grinding comedy of trying to stay alive. In that world, promises of salvation can feel like a con, and threats of damnation like an extra bill you never agreed to pay. The final line - “Maybe that’s why we get along” - is affectionate, but it’s also a verdict on people: we don’t get along because we can’t stop prosecuting ourselves and each other.