Alcohol
Quotes - I always think the opening moments of a party are the hardest, before
everyone has had enough to drink
“Through
the discovery of Buchner, Biology was relieved of another fragment of
mysticism. The splitting up of sugar into CO2 and alcohol is no more the effect
of a 'vital principle' than the splitting up of cane sugar by invertase. The
history of this problem is instructive, as it warns us against considering
problems as beyond our reach because they have not yet found their solution.”
―
Jacques Loeb
“I
always think the opening moments of a party are the hardest, before everyone
has had enough to drink.”
―
Stephanie Clifford, Everybody Rise
“I
took a breath. Pictured the bed waiting for me upstairs. Then retreated to the
lobby
bar
alone and ordered an ice-cold gin martini, a small signal to myself that my
work was
done.
I held the glass, its inverted construction an insult to gravity and the order
of things.
Just
like our Movement, from the outside the balance of power seems all wrong. But
hold a
martini
glass in your hand and you know instinctively that it is just right.”
―
Stuart Connelly, Confessions of a Velour-Shirted Man
“Curse
you, cheap beer. Must find miso in tiny packet.”
―
MCM
“You
can never feel a cup of someone whose taste is bubbles when you're spirit.”
―
Goitsemang Mvula
“Sex
parties, alcohol and drugs lost their appeal to Sven after a while. Music never
did, in his continual search for that sober connection--intimacy with one
person over a long period of time, as opposed to periods of intimacy with a
bunch of random faces.”
―
Jess C. Scott, Sven
“There
has never been a 'war on drugs'! In our history we can only see an ongoing
conflict amongst various drug users – and producers. In ancient Mexico the use
of alcohol was punishable by death, while the ritualistic use of mescaline was
highly worshipped. In 17th century Russia, tobacco smokers were threatened with
mutilation or decapitation, alcohol was legal. In Prussia, coffee drinking was
prohibited to the lower classes, the use of tobacco and alcohol was legal.”
―
Sebastian Marincolo
“The
ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of
intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of consumption are
costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific. Therefore the base classes,
primarily the women, practice an enforced continence with respect to these
stimulants, except in countries where they are obtainable at a very low cost.
From archaic times down through all the length of the patriarchal regime it has
been the office of the women to prepare and administer these luxuries, and it
has been the perquisite of the men of gentle birth and breeding to consume
them. Drunkenness and the other pathological consequences of the free use of
stimulants therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a mark, at
the second remove, of the superior status of those who are able to afford the
indulgence. Infirmities induced by over-indulgence are among some peoples
freely recognised as manly attributes. It has even happened that the name for
certain diseased conditions of the body arising from such an origin has passed
into everyday speech as a synonym for "noble" or "gentle".
It is only at a relatively early stage of culture that the symptoms of
expensive vice are conventionally accepted as marks of a superior status, and
so tend to become virtues and command the deference of the community; but the
reputability that attaches to certain expensive vices long retains so much of
its force as to appreciably lesson the disapprobation visited upon the men of
the wealthy or noble class for any excessive indulgence. The same invidious
distinction adds force to the current disapproval of any indulgence of this
kind on the part of women, minors, and inferiors. This invidious traditional
distinction has not lost its force even among the more advanced peoples of
today. Where the example set by the leisure class retains its imperative force
in the regulation of the conventionalities, it is observable that the women
still in great measure practise the same traditional continence with regard to
stimulants.”
―
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class
“The
best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the
sum of the two parts.”
―
Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
“He
seemed to be lying on the bed. He could not see very well. Her youthful,
rapacious face, with blackened eyebrows, leaned over him as he sprawled there.
“‘How
about my present?’ she demanded, half wheedling, half menacing.
“Never
mind that now. To work! Come here. Not a bad mouth. Come here. Come closer. Ah!
“No.
No use. Impossible. The will but not the way. The spirit is willing but the
flesh is weak. Try again. No. The booze, it must be. See Macbeth. One last try.
No, no use. Not this evening, I’m afraid.
“All
right, Dora, don’t you worry. You’ll get your two quid all right. We aren’t
paying by results.
“He
made a clumsy gesture. ‘Here, give us that bottle. That bottle off the
dressing-table.’
“Dora
brought it. Ah, that’s better. That at least doesn’t fail.”
―
George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
“The
others would then fall silent and she would continue about doped gallium
arsenide detectors, or the ethanol content of the galactic cloud W-3. The
quantity of 200-proof alcohol in this single interstellar cloud was more than
enough to maintain the present population of the Earth, if every adult were a
dedicated alcoholic, for the age of the solar system. The tamada had
appreciated the remark.”
―
Carl Sagan, Contact
“What
struck me, in reading the reports from Sri Lanka, was the mild disgrace of
belonging to our imperfectly evolved species in the first place. People who had
just seen their neighbors swept away would tell the reporters that they knew a
judgment had been coming, because the Christians had used alcohol and meat at
Christmas or because ... well, yet again you can fill in the blanks for
yourself. It was interesting, though, to notice that the Buddhists were often
the worst. Contentedly patting an image of the chubby lord on her fencepost, a
woman told the New York Times that those who were not similarly protected had
been erased, while her house was still standing. There were enough such
comments, almost identically phrased, to make it seem certain that the Buddhist
authorities had been promulgating this consoling and insane and nasty view.
That would not surprise me.”
―
Christopher Hitchens
“His
abhorrence and fear of alcohol did not extend to his power as host. He kept a
huge cupboard of drinks in the station house and loved to serve large measures
to visiting relatives--especially those he disliked--about which there was a
definite element of spreading bait for garden snails.”
―
John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun
“Oh
God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning... No paragraph, no phrase even
of the thousands the book must contain could strike a discordant note, be less
than fully imagined, an entire novel's worth of thought would have to be
expended on each one. His attention had only to lapse for a moment, between
preposition and object, colophon and chapter heading, for dead spots to appear
like gangrene that would rot the whole. Silkworms didn't work as finely or as
patiently as he must, and yet boldness was all, the large stroke, the end
contained in and prophesied by the beginning, the stains of his clouds
infinitely various but all signifying sunrise. Unity in diversity, all that
guff. An enormous weariness flew over him. The trouble with drink, he had long
known, wasn't that it started up these large things but that it belittled the
awful difficulties of their execution. ("Novelty")”
―
John Crowley, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s
to Now
“Shan
stared at his glass, then lifted it under his nose. It was the closest he would
knowingly get to tasting the hard liquor. It was not because it would violate
the vows of the monks, which he had not taken, but because somehow it felt as
though it would violate his teachers who still sat behind prison wire in
Lhadrung.”
―
Eliot Pattison, Water Touching Stone
“Sam
took another sip of the pruno. It went down smoother this time, possibly
because he no longer had feeling in his extremities.”
―
Tod Goldberg, The Reformed
