Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Bukowski

Bukowski turns romantic attachment into a grim little logic puzzle, the kind you can only solve by admitting you were never in control. The line lunges forward on one breath, stitched together with “and” and “anyhow”, as if he’s arguing with himself at a bar, or daring you to call him sentimental. That run-on structure is the point: love isn’t a clean moral lesson here, it’s a compulsive negotiation with inevitability.

The apparent advice - let her go to keep her - hides a colder thesis: possession is the surest way to lose. Bukowski frames “keeping” as something you attempt through restraint, not conquest. The irony is that the strategy that might preserve a relationship (“know when to let…go”) requires the very humility most people only learn after they’ve already ruined one. Then he undercuts even that sliver of agency: if you don’t want to keep her, you “let her go anyhow”. Either way, you’re practicing release. “Always” is the knife twist; it suggests a worldview where attachment is temporary by definition, and the only real skill is surrender.

Contextually, it sits squarely in Bukowski’s bruised romantic mythology: men who want closeness but flinch at its costs, relationships treated less as redemption than as another arena where ego gets punished. The gendered phrasing is dated, even telling - woman as the one who must be “kept” - yet the line accidentally exposes its own insecurity. Underneath the macho cadence is fear: not of losing her, exactly, but of needing her and being powerless about it.