I began drinking because the thought that I was drinking gave me a kind of identity: each time I poured myself a brandy in the deserted afternoon I could say to myself 'I am a woman who drinks.

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.

I better understood the little lies that liquor told, lifting spirits and drowning sorrows while withholding the whole truth--that, in the end, it is the spirit in peril of drowning. Sorrows have gills.

If you could pour my love like it was a bottle of wine, would you have one glass or two? That was a trick question, because the answer is you’d drink it all—straight out of the bottle.


I mean, you know how it is. You chase a bottle of sleeping pills with a bottle of Jack Daniel's and life's never the same, no matter how many times you try to tell people it was just an accident.

Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it. I drank more and continued my mantra. 'Stop thinking', swig, 'empty your head', swig, 'now, seriously empty your head'.

They sell courage of a sort in the taverns. And another sort, though not for sale, a man can find in the confessional. Try the alehouses and the churches, Hugh. In either a man can be quiet and think.

Networking is more quality, and less quantity. It’s better to form a solid connection with one new person, than a liquid connection with ten. You don’t want people to think you drink too much.

Getting drunk was good. I decided that I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious and maybe. If you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn't become obvious yourself.

After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.

The food we were given was no more than eatable, but the patron was not mean about drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each, knowing that if a plongeur is not given two litres he will steal three.

The only way that I could figure they could improve upon Coca-Cola, one of life's most delightful elixirs, which studies prove will heal the sick and occasionally raise the dead, is to put bourbon in it.

Alcohol makes you do some crazy things, like speak openly of your love, fornicate with strangers, and occasionally commit murder. That’s why I stopped drinking. Been sober now for over three days.


He dozed off, into a dreamless oblivion, for what seemed like seconds but was in fact hours, and awoke hungover, the inner surface of his skull pulsing like a single, giant nerve being chewed by some ruminant animal.

To be certain you're consuming the real deal, look carefully at the label. W-h-i-s-k-e-y indicates the heavenly liquid from the Emerald Isle. Without the "e," it's from Scotland or some other godforsaken place.