Drinking Quotes

Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug.

~ Caroline Knapp

Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment--that being alive is important, because just when you least expect it, you might receive exactly what you least expect.

~ Douglas Coupland

In Mississippi the important thing is hooch, not bar equipment.

~ Florence King

More wine for me, pour me some more! You smart girl, I knew you're a smart girl, just teasing...” Faces turn red, the dark earth blood is rising. They wink at Pelka, wink at the host: He knows his goods! The women feel the buttons constricting them - they undo one, another, a third. By twos the guests go outside to get some air. Well, my dear guests, are you soaked to the gills? Eh? And now-to dance! Get lively! The table and the chairs vanish. The middle of the room is empty. Ivan the Monk jumps out of his hole, a tambourine in his hands: Tim-ta-a-am! Tim-ta-a-am! “Eh-hey! the redhead suddenly snatches the tambourine and sweeps off, tapping wildly in a circle. Eyes closed: a white sleepless sun-a white night on the meadow-white columns of smoke swaying over fires... Eh-ah!-to whirl herself to death, to whirl out everything, to empty herself - nothing has ever been... Heavy boots are thumping on the floor, beards fly in the wind, the frock-coat tails go flying... hey, get going, faster, faster - a hundred versts an hour! (The North)

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Elliot Rawley was a drinker, Cy’s mother had been right. And he was a poor drinker. One that let the demons of the bottle into his head when he tipped it back, demons that went about unloosing all the trouble they could find stashed in the catacombs of his mind. Every tragic thing that had ever happened, every self-doubt, every delusion, freed itself from bondage and revisited him when he drank.

~ Sarah Hall

For he was drinking too much. Not uncontrollably nor offensively, but still he seldom seemed to have a glass out of his hand.

~ Rosamunde Pilcher

Do you prefer fermented or distilled?This is a trick question. It doesn’t matter how much you like wine, because wine is social and writing is anti-social. This is a writer’s interview, writing is a lonely job, and spirits are the lubricant of the lonely. You might say all drinking is supposed to be social but there’s a difference, at one in the morning while you’re hunched over your computer, between opening up a bottle of Chardonnay and pouring two-fingers of bourbon into a tumbler. A gin martini, of course, splits the difference nicely, keeping you from feeling like a deadline reporter with a smoldering cigarette while still reminding you that your job is to be interesting for a living. Anyone who suggests you can make a martini with vodka, by the way, is probably in need of electroconvulsive therapy.

~ Stuart Connelly

I'm going out for a bottle of champagne. We're going to get bombed.

~ Stephen King

Those partial to drink were hiding faults and dishonesty. They were sloppy souls, even the ones with pleasant manners and fine noses.

~ Sarah Hall

Mulled ale for the frozen man,And mulled ale for the weary:For mulled ale is the body's friendAnd makes the sick heart merry.

~ Frans G. Bengtsson

Quite possibly one of the most revealing passages about Shakespeare as a man comes from one of the roughest of the jottings made by gossip John Aubrey from his interview with William Beeston, son of the Christopher Beeston who had acted with Shakespeare's company. The partly cancelled note reads: 'the more to be admired, he was not a company keeper. [He] ... wouldn't be debauched, and if invited to, writ [i.e. wrote] he was in pain.' [Ch.24]

~ Ian Wilson

Common sense got drunk and giddy when Olivia was on the premises. Maybe he should just raise a glass, too, and dub reason a lost cause.

~ Kelly Moran

Natives of the Florida Keys often refer to themselves as Conchs, and for good reason: They have been drinking.

~ Dave Barry

Does drinking make you wittier? One might as well ask if witting makes you drinkier, which it may.

~ Benjamin Errett

Being unkillable, so long as one had some healing power stored up, could do strange things to a person’s sense of self-preservation. Of course, Wayne had probably been drunk at the time. That also tended to do strange things to a person’s sense of self-preservation

~ Brandon Sanderson

Life is better when you're drunk. I ought to become an alcoholic.

~ Ahmed Mostafa

She was thinking of doing a little Cuervo therapy.

~ Kelly Moran

Giving up alcohol is an asceticism for the modern do-gooder, drinking being, like sex, a pleasure that humans have always indulged in, involving a loss of self-control, the renunciation of which marks the renouncer as different and separate from other people. To drink, to get drunk, is to lower yourself on purpose for the sake of good fellowship. You abandon yourself, for a time, to life and fate. You allow yourself to become stupider and less distinct. Your boundaries become blurry: you open your self and feel connected to people around you. You throw off your moral scruples, and suspect it was only those scruples that prevented the feeling of connection before. You feel more empathy for your fellow, but at the same time, because you are drunk, you render yourself unable to help him; so, to drink is to say, I am a sinner, I have chosen not to help.

~ Larissa Macfarquhar

Actually, they fought to fill the emptiness of their lives as they filled their empty glasses. They fought—not because the liquor was in them, but because it did not fill them enough.

~ Nelson Algren

Holy fuck,' Corcoran said, leaning back against the wall. 'I am going home and drinking a whole bottle of Bacardi. Someone can pour the Coke into me after I pass out.

~ M.r. Carey

He could see that drinking and conversation were inexorably intertwined and that one did not occur without the other.

~ Kenneth Eade

I’m only doing one more,” Ruby said, scrolling through her phone. “Nobody likes a day-drunk hussie.”“Hey, give yourself some credit. You’ll be a really cute day- drunk hussie.

~ Daniel Younger

Child, you’ve been trying to drown your sorrows for some time now. And the problem with that plan is, you can’t drown sorrows. They’re good swimmers. They’re gonna float back up to the top and be bobbing right where you left them last night.

~ Terri Lee

Free drinks have no carbs.

~ Nicki Elson

And there was this jerk named Dwayne who kept saying, 'Go on, have a beer. You know you want one. One little beer's not going to hurt ya. You haven't had a drink for three years. You can handle it.' He looked at me again. You know?I nodded.Caught me when I was vulnerable. You know, when I was still breathing.

~ Bill Bryson

Well,” he sighed, squeezing my hand back. “I guess we were both running away in different ways.”“What do you mean?”Dad shook his head. “Your mother took a Mustang. I took a whiskey bottle.” He reached up and readjusted his glasses, an unconscious habit-he always did it when he was making a point. “I was so devastated by what your mother did to me that I forgot how horrible drinking is. I forgot to look on the bright side.”“Dad,” I said, “I don’t think there is a bright side to divorce. It’s a pretty sucky thing all around.”He nodded. “Maybe that’s true, but there are a lot of bright sides to my life. I have a job I like, a nice house in a good neighborhood, and a wonderful daughter.”I rolled my eyes. “Oh God,” I muttered. “Don’t go all Lifetime movie on me. Seriously.”“I’m sorry,” he said, smiling. “But I mean it. A lot of people would kill for my life, but I didn’t even consider that. I took it-and you-for granted. I’m so, so sorry for that, Bumblebee.

~ Kody Keplinger

Do not blame a person for drinking lest he is trying to forget something more serious than drinking.

~ Kahlil Gibran

i've had enough of this. if you'll excuse me, i'm going to find a tavern where i can pay an underdressed woman to sit it my lap and look very pleased with me while i drink heavily

~ Lisa Kleypas

I drank through the buzz of befuddlement into perfect clarity and out again into the blissful confusion of true intoxication.

~ John Mole

Think about it. When you reach 18 you're no longer an underage drinker. This means that drinking is no longer an act of rebellion, and so there's no point in doing it any more. You've got to find some other way of looking hard in front of your friends, like attaching weights to your testicles and swimming naked through the snapping turtle pond at the zoo

~ Andre The Bfg

What she liked the most about drinking was not being present, that feeling of self-evasion, of disconnection, of liberation, of escape. Alcohol offered her an excellent alternative to being herself without actually dying.

~ Laura Esquivel

The rows of empty jugs had multiplied with the speed of caged rabbits.

~ Daniel Polansky

There was a sound in their voices which suggested rum.

~ Robert Louis Sevenson

The Americans called theirs the Officers Club but the Canadians called ours the Officers Mess. The American term was the more honest, ours the more accurate. Drunken officers at play are messy.

~ R.j. Childerhose

Booze really was medicinal, after a near-death experience. Holding a drink in both hands and letting it corrode the topmost layer of his mouth and throat, Laurence felt a spiritual relationship with Bushmills.

~ Charlie Jane Anders

A near-fatal case of scurvy being the only reason I can imagine drinking something with grapefruit juice in it.

~ James S.a. Corey

The more I drink the better I write and the more I write the better I drink.

~ Shawn Hatfield

You're the measure of my true decline. Your home isn't in the underworld, you live in the back room of the liquor store. My eternally hung-over angel, my Satan crawling like an amber worm from a bottle of Zoladkowa Gorzka.

~ Jerzy Pilch

To be or not to be, fucked up on whiskey, that is the question.

~ Robert Black

We were at that moment of drunkenness that the two of us had come to call the Golden Moment, when everything made sense. We always tried to stretch out that moment, and then inevitably one of us would confess, I can't follow anymore, I think the Golden Moment's passed.

~ Anne Rice