Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Bukowski

Loneliness is one of Bukowski's favorite drugs: it takes the edge off the world, then leaves you sicker when it wears off. That split is exactly what makes this line sting. "Good" is a bodily, immediate sensation - the short-term relief of not having to perform, explain yourself, or get bruised by other people's needs. "Right" is moral, existential, almost anatomical: the sense that a life is aligned with its purpose. Bukowski lets the two words fight it out, and the point is that pleasure isn't proof.

The lowercase, unadorned phrasing does its usual Bukowski work: it refuses the literary halo. No epiphany, no clean lesson, just the blunt confession of someone who has tested solitude the way you test cheap whiskey. The repetition of "felt" turns the line into a self-audit. He isn't making a philosophical claim about the human condition; he's reporting data from the body.

Context matters because Bukowski's persona - barroom poet, chronic outsider, reluctant romantic - depends on this tension. He built a career on contempt for polite intimacy, yet his writing keeps circling back to the need for witness: someone to see you, or at least to make your absence matter. The subtext is almost cruelly tender: alone can be a sanctuary, but it can't be a home. Even when it "works", it doesn't justify itself.