Alcohol quotations

Page 3

◆ Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you'll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common.

- David Sedaris99

◆ Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages.

- Louis Pasteur99

◆ Scotch whisky is made from barley and the morning dew on angel's nipples.

- Warren Ellis99

◆ I want to meet a woman named Sherry who only drinks brandy, and a woman named Brandy who only drinks sherry. Then I'll offer each one of them one magical night of sex with me, in the form of two of my clones.

- Jarod Kintz99

◆ If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.

- Bill Hicks99

◆ Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.

- Christopher Hitchens99

◆ Alcohol ruined me financially and morally, broke my heart and the hearts of too many others. Even though it did this to me and it almost killed me and I haven't touched a drop of it in seventeen years, sometimes I wonder if I could get away with drinking some now. I totally subscribe to the notion that alcoholism is a mental illness because thinking like that is clearly insane.

- Craig Ferguson99

◆ Ignorance is a lot like alcohol: the more you have of it, the less you are able to see its effect on you.

- Jay M. Bylsma99

◆ They're professionals at this in Russia, so no matter how many Jell-O shots or Jager shooters you might have downed at college mixers, no matter how good a drinker you might think you are, don't forget that the Russians - any Russian - can drink you under the table.

- Anthony Bourdain99

◆ it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance

- William Shakespeare99

◆ Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat.

- Charles Bukowski99

◆ If I have a near-beer, I'm near beer. And if I'm near beer, I'm close to tequila. And if I'm close to tequila, I'm adjacent to cocaine.

- Craig Ferguson99

◆ It's 4:58 on Friday afternoon. Do you know where your margarita is?

- Amy Neftzger99

◆ The stains could be seen only in the sunlight, so Ruth was never really aware of them until later, when she would stop at an outdoor cafe for a cup of coffee, and look down at her skirt and see the dark traces of spilled vodka or whiskey. The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: 'booze affects material as it does people'.

- Alice Sebold99

◆ When life gives you lemons, find someone who has vodka and throw a party.

- Charith Thilina99