Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Bukowski

Bukowski turns survival into a bar tab, and the joke lands because it’s only half a joke. “I still have a little whiskey left and therefore a chance” is gallows optimism stripped of self-help varnish: hope isn’t a sunrise or a breakthrough, it’s inventory. The line performs one of Bukowski’s core tricks - taking the grand language of redemption and routing it through something cheap, immediate, and bodily. “Therefore” is the dagger. It’s mock-logical, like a philosopher doing proofs at last call, insisting that a dwindling supply can still justify staying in the game.

The intent isn’t to glamorize drinking so much as to admit how low the bar for “a chance” can get when you’ve been pummeled by work, poverty, rejection, or your own mind. Whiskey becomes a literal buffer against despair and a stand-in for any small resource that postpones collapse: a few dollars, a cigarette, a friend who picks up. By naming the crutch, he refuses the usual moralizing narrative (sobriety as purity, suffering as nobility). He’s confessing dependence while also weaponizing it as a stubborn form of agency: I can’t control the world, but I can control this next swallow, this next hour.

Context matters: Bukowski’s persona is the chronic loser who keeps writing, keeps showing up, keeps getting back off the floor. The line’s power comes from that scale shift - “a little” is pathetic and profound at once - making endurance feel both degraded and weirdly heroic.