Will you come home and stop this pain tonight?

A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.

—Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?

—― Charles Bukowski, Factotum