— Malcolm Lowry
But there were also topers who, sensing an excess of drink within themselves, and unwilling to give up when the merriment continued after dinner, would go behind the house, deliberately make themselves vomit, then return to the company and start drinking all over again.
— Jędrzej Kitowicz
Don’t you find it a little tiresome living with a drunk? You haven’t seen the worst yet. I knock everything over. I puke the whole time. It’s a miracle I’ve felt so good these last few days. You’re like an antidote that’s mixed with the alcohol to maintain my equilibrium; but it won’t last forever.
— John O’Brien
And He will pass sentence on everyone justly, and He will forgive the good and the evil, the arrogant and the humble. . And when He is done with everyone, then He will say unto us too: “You too come hither,” he will say. “Come, all you thoroughly drunk ones! Come, you weak, weak ones! Come, you disgraced ones!” And we will all come without shame and stand before Him. And He will say: “You are swine! In the image and likeness of beasts! But come to me, you too!”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
Only a second-rate mind is unable to choose between literature and a true night of the soul.
— E. M. Cioran
Yet I cannot comprehend how someone was able to extend the pleasure of drinking beyond his thirst, and create in his imagination as it were an artificial and unnatural appetite.
— Michel de Montaigne
Lord, grant all us drunkards such a gentle and beautiful death.
— Joseph Roth
“I think I feel like a drink.”
“Almost everyone feels like a drink, it’s just they don’t know it.”
— Charles Bukowski
I was terrified and drank more than ever. I was attempting my first novel. I drank a pint of whiskey and two six packs of beer each night while writing. I smoked cheap cigars and typed and drank and listened to classical music on the radio until dawn. I set a goal of ten pages a night but I never knew until the next day how many pages I had written. I’d get up in the morning, vomit, then walk to the front room and look on the couch to see how many pages there were. I always exceeded my ten.
— Charles Bukowski
And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write. .
— Revelation
This shaking keeps me steady.
— Theodore Roethke
And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud. .
— Revelation
Hard drink is the gateway to all immorality:
To quarrels and insults, to stealing, vulgarity,
And other things too; for the drunken man’s sin
Is the devil within.
— Song Against Drunkenness
(from Heczka’s hymnal, no. 443)
Why don’t you sing us that little drunken aria?
— (from Samuel B. Linde’s dictionary)
As a biologist, as a social thinker concerned with power and world projects, the molding of a universal order, as a furnisher of interpretation and opinion to the educated masses — as all of these he appeared to need a great amount of copulation.
— Saul Bellow
Vodka’s a strange thing. It’s a fiendishly sharp drink, a mysterious concoction of herbs, which has some peculiar relation to the stars.
— Herman Broch
We walked side by side down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and in front of the window of the anti-alcohol league, which as usual contained a display of desiccated brains, I said:
“At this point, of course, it’s best to cross to the other side.”
— Philippe Soupault
A real man is one who desires repetition.
— Søren Kierkegaard
At sixteen, while still at school, I began to visit more regularly than before a pleasantly informal bawdy house; after sampling all seven girls, I concentrated my attention on roly-poly Polymnia, with whom I used to drink lots of foamy beer at a wet table in an orchard — I simply adore orchards.
— Vladimir Nabokov
My soul is among lions. .
— Psalm 57
Vats of porter wonderful. Rats get in too. Drink themselves bloated as big as a collie floating. Dead drunk on the porter. Drink till they puke again like christians.
— James Joyce
While I was in the helicopter whopping over Manhattan, viewing New York as if I were passing in a glass-bottomed boat over a tropical reef, Humboldt was probably groping among his bottles for a drop of juice to mix with his morning gin.
— Saul Bellow
Life is possible only as a result of discontinuities.
— E. M. Cioran
My Lord, I loved strawberry jam
And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body.
Also well-chilled vodka.
— Czesław Miłosz
If it weren’t for the thought of suicide, I’d have killed myself long ago.
— E. M. Cioran
They that sit in the gate speak against me; and I was the song of the drunkards.
— Psalm 69
Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known.
— Psalm 77
And now help me decide: what should I drink?
— Venedikt Erofeev
Chapter 14. The Poems of Alberta
LOVELY, LOVELY AS a dream were the poems of Alberta. Light, or perhaps shadow, a ray of light, or the shadow of a child, a mysterious and unclear little soul moved through those poems from line to line. It abided in the old homestead, and in a husky soprano it sang a song for all the objects and furnishings that had ever belonged there. Alberta recited a poem about a tin kettle on the stove top that had once been used to boil water; she recited a poem about the water of yesteryear, about the stove top itself, about the candle on the Christmas table; she recited a beautiful love poem about the woolen cap of a boy who passed beneath her window every day on his way to school.
How long it lasted I couldn’t say; how long Alberta’s recitation went on I couldn’t really say; it was shorter rather than longer and I’m pretty sure that during this time I did not lapse into a shorter or longer admiration-filled nap. In any case she recited her poems standing in the center of the room as if in the center of a stage, and everything suggested then and suggests now that it ought to have been ridiculous, whereas in fact it was not only not ridiculous, it made the experience even more affecting. I listened to the poems of Alberta as she stood there on the linoleum like a statue, and I felt I was reclining on a cloud.
Afterwards she sat on the edge of the cloud, which had now gone back to being the alluring edge of the mattress, and she placed her warm hand on my icy-cold hand, and she asked me the question I had heard a thousand times before, she asked me the question I have been asked by thousands, millions of people, she asked me the question I’ve been asked by Europeans, Asians, Americans, Africans, Australians, and possibly even Eskimos, she asked me the question that at this point only the Lord God may never have asked me.
“Why do you drink?” asked Alberta.
“Alberta,” I replied, choking up, “if I’d met you twenty years ago I wouldn’t drink at all.”
“First of all, twenty years ago I was four years old and if you’d actually met me then, then you’d really have knocked it back, you’d have knocked it back two times or a hundred times more,” she responded. “But call me Ala, I prefer it. Why do you drink?” she repeated.