Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Bukowski

Bukowski’s two-line blasphemy is also a weird kind of compliment: he drags Joan of Arc and Jesus out of stained glass and into the only category he reliably trusts, the one you can’t fake for long - style. Coming from a poet who made a career of scorning respectability, “style” isn’t a fashion magazine adjective. It’s an ethic. It’s how you stand when the room hates you, how you keep your nerve when the stakes are humiliating, bodily, final.

The pairing is the move. Joan and Jesus are both figures whose authority comes from refusal: refusal to recant, to soften the message, to negotiate with power. Bukowski isn’t weighing theology or martyrdom; he’s saluting the performance of conviction, the kind that makes institutions reach for fire and nails. In his universe, sincerity is rare and punishment is proof you had it.

There’s cynicism baked in, too. By reducing saints to “style,” Bukowski needles the way modern culture flattens everything into branding. Yet he also uses that flattening as a backdoor to reverence. He can’t quite say “holiness” without gagging, so he says “style” - a word tough enough for his persona, elastic enough to smuggle awe.

Context matters: Bukowski wrote as an anti-hero with a working-class chip on his shoulder, allergic to piety but obsessed with the dignity of outsiders. This line reads like a poet admitting, through clenched teeth, that the greatest rebels weren’t in bars or racetracks. They were on trial.