Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Bukowski

It sounds like a bedtime blessing, but it’s Bukowski doing what he does best: smuggling a feral worldview into a throwaway line. “Cats and rain” isn’t some whimsical Pinterest aesthetic; it’s a stripped-down utopia built from two things that don’t flatter humans. Cats are indifferent, self-possessed, and quietly predatory. Rain is impersonal, cleansing, relentless. Put them together and you get a world that carries on without asking permission, without applauding anyone’s hustle, without pretending people are the center of the story.

The syntax matters: the looping repetition (“cats and rain, rain and cats”) mimics a drunken mantra or a tired mind trying to land on something simple enough to believe. Bukowski often writes from the late hours, when the day’s performances fall apart and what’s left is sensation: weather on a window, an animal moving through a room, the small mercies that don’t require conversation. The line’s casual closure - “very nice, good night” - is the real knife. It’s funny, yes, but it’s also a refusal to litigate meaning. He doesn’t argue for a better world; he shrugs toward one.

Contextually, Bukowski’s poetry is packed with bruised realism: low-wage labor, gambling, booze, failed romance, the grind of being conscious. Against that backdrop, “just cats and rain” reads like an anti-ideology. Not hope exactly - more like relief. A world reduced to creatures that won’t pretend to love you and a sky that won’t pretend to care.