Drank Alcohol Quotes

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.

It's like when my doctor told me the story of these two brothers whose dad was a bad alcoholic. One brother grew up to be a successful carpenter and never drank. The other brother ended up being a drinker as bad as his dad was. When they asked the first brother why he didn't drink, he said that after he saw what it did to his father, he could never bring himself to even try it. When they asked the other brother, he said that he guessed he learned how to drink on his father's knee. So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.

I drank so much booze I was bamboozled. Alcohol makes my mind as discombobulated as love makes my heart. I’d sure appreciate it if you poured me a large glass of romance.

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'.

I used the boos, and not the booze, as motivation. That led to applause, which I drank up like an alcoholic. I need a refill.

You tasted like fire And I miss that. So, at times I drank a little. And at times, I drank too much. But I only drank Till it burned me enough.

I once heard a sober alcoholic say that drinking never made him happy, but it made him feel like he was going to be happy in about fifteen minutes. That was exactly it, and I couldn’t understand why the happiness never came, couldn’t see the flaw in my thinking, couldn’t see that alcohol kept me trapped in a world of illusion, procrastination, paralysis. I lived always in the future, never in the present. Next time, next time! Next time I drank it would be different, next time it would make me feel good again. And all my efforts were doomed, because already drinking hadn’t made me feel good in years.

I felt empty and sad for years, and for a long, long time, alcohol worked. I’d drink, and all the sadness would go away. Not only did the sadness go away, but I was fantastic. I was beautiful, funny, I had a great figure, and I could do math. But at some point, the booze stopped working. That’s when drinking started sucking. Every time I drank, I could feel pieces of me leaving. I continued to drink until there was nothing left. Just emptiness.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn't drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it's what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter.

I had two speeds, which often varied with my blood alcohol level: fine with whatever, and never, ever satisfied. Where was the balance between these two?

...but you drank your black coffee by choice, believeng that Paris was sufficient alcohol.

Now I’m sober and I realize, I didn’t drink to escape the world, I drank to escape myself

Alcoholism is a self-diagnosis. Science offers no biopsy, no home kit to purchase at CVS. Doctors and friends can offer opinions, and you can take a hundred online quizzes. But alcoholism is something you must know in your gut.

Overthinkers are the most exhausting alcoholics.

I drank a portion of her blood, just enough to keep the virus under control, but not enough to kill her. It was like drinking one of Ophelia’s cocktails. The alcohol in her bloodstream filled me with dizzy thoughts, while the blood filled the virus with more hunger.

Randy knew he wasn't an alcoholic because an alcoholic craved liquor. He never craved it. He just drank for pleasure and the most pleasurable of all drinks was the first one on a crisp winter morning. Besides, when you took it with coffee that made it part of breakfast, and therefore not so depraved.

When I sit in rooms with people once considered washed up, I feel at home. I’ve come to think of being an alcoholic as one of the best things that ever happened to me. Those low years startled me awake. I stopped despairing for what I didn’t get and I began cherishing what I did.

I'm not sad or embarrassed to be an alcoholic anymore. I get irritated when I hear parents use that jokey shorthand: God, I hope my kid doesn't end up in rehab. Or: God, I hope my kid doesn't end up in therapy. I understand the underlying wish -- I hope my kid grows up happy and safe. When we say things like that, though, we underscore the false belief that people who seek help are failures and people who don't seek help are a success. It's not true. Some of the healthiest, most accomplished people I know went to both rehab and therapy, and I've known some sick motherfuckers who managed to avoid both.

I understood drinking to be the gasoline of all adventure.

Let’s get a drink,” we say to each other, when what we mean is “Let’s spend time together.” It’s almost as if, in absence of alcohol, we have no idea what to do. “Let’s take a walk in the park” would be met with some very confused glances.

Do you think it was my fault that she drank?" my father asked not long ago. It's the assumption of an amateur, someone who stops after his second vodka tonic and quits taking his pain medication before the prescription runs out. It's almost laughable, this insistence on a reason. I think my mother was lonely without her children—her fan club. But I think she drank because she was an alcoholic.

I tried instead to drown my soul in drink. I cannot say I like alcohol, but I am someone who can drink if I choose to, and I set about obliterating my heart by drinking all I could. This was a puerile way out, of course, and it very quickly led to an even greater despair with the world. In the midst of a drunken stupor, I would come to my senses and realize what an idiot I was to try to fool myself like this. Then my vision and understanding grew clear, and I sat shivering and sober. There were desolate times when even the poor disguise of drunkenness failed to work, no matter how I drank. And each time I sought pleasure in drink, I emerged more depressed than ever.

The whiskey was a good start. I got the idea from Dylan Thomas. He's this poet who drank twenty-one straight whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern in New York and then died on the spot from alcohol poisoning. I've always wanted to hear the bartender's side of the story. What was it like watching this guy drink himself out of here? How did it feel handing him number twenty-one and watching his face crumple up before the fall of the stool? And did he already have number twenty-two poured, waiting for this big fat tip, and then have to drink it himself after whoever came took the body away?

The life of the sane, average man was dull, worse than death. There seemed to be no possible alternative. Education also seemed to be a trap. The little education I had allowed myself had made me more suspicious. What were doctors, lawyers, scientists? They were just men who allowed themselves to be deprived of their freedom to think and act as individuals. I went back to my shack and drank ...

I didn’t chug the hairspray because I’m an alcoholic. I drank it to style my throat hairs.

The person his dad became when he drank had no connection to the person he was when he was sober. And so it was comforting to think about Dad being a werewolf. That he in fact contained a whole other person in his body. Just as the moon brought out the wolf in a werewolf, so alcohol brought this creature out of his dad.

Have a drink?" " I don't need it," said Halloway. "But someone inside me does." "Who?" The boy I once was, thought Halloway, who runs like the leaves down the sidewalk autumn nights. But he couldn't say that. So he drank, eyes shut, listening to hear if that thing inside turned over again, rustling in the deep bons that were stacked for burning but never burned.

This is the point where the knowing, irony-infused author laughs along with his readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity Kool-Aid. That's some other book. Slogans saved my life. All of them--the dumb ones, the preachy ones, the imperatives, the cliches, the injunctives, the gooey, Godly ones, the shameless, witless ones.

It wasn't fair that my friends could stay at Captain Morgan's pirate ship party while I was drop-kicked into a basement with homeless people chanting the Serenity Prayer.

I drank whiskey because I was depressed, and whiskey made sure I stayed depressed.

If we drank green smoothies like we drink alcohol, we would live forever.

The rest of the family tree had a root system soggy with alcohol... One aunt had fallen asleep with her face in the mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner; another's fondness for Coors was so unwavering that I can still remember the musky smell of the beer and the coldness of the cans. Most of the men drank the way all Texas men drank, or so I believed, which meant that they were tough guys who could hold their liquor until they couldn't anymore--a capacity that often led to some cloudy version of doom, be it financial ruin or suicide or the lesser betrayal of simple estrangement. Both social drinkers, my parents had eluded these tragic endings; in the postwar Texas of suburbs and cocktails, their drinking was routine but undramatic.

Like most people who decide to get sober, I was brought to Alcoholics Anonymous. While AA certainly works for others, its core propositions felt irreconcilable with my own experiences. I couldn't, for example, rectify the assertion that "alcoholism is a disease" with the facts of my own life. The idea that by simply attending an AA meeting, without any consultation, one is expected to take on a blanket diagnosis of "diseased addict" was to me, at best, patronizing. At worst, irresponsible. Irresponsible because it doesn't encourage people to turn toward and heal the actual underlying causes of their abuse of substances. I drank for thirteen years for REALLY good reasons. Among them were unprocessed grief, parental abandonment, isolation, violent trauma, anxiety and panic, social oppression, a general lack of safety, deep existential discord, and a tremendous diet and lifestyle imbalance. None of which constitute a disease, and all of which manifest as profound internal, mental, emotional and physical discomfort, which I sought to escape by taking external substances. It is only through one's own efforts to turn toward life on its own terms and to develop a wiser relationship to what's there through mindfulness and compassion that make freedom from addictive patterns possible. My sobriety has been sustained by facing life, processing grief, healing family relationships, accepting radically the fact of social oppression, working with my abandonment conditioning, coming into community, renegotiating trauma, making drastic diet and lifestyle changes, forgiving, and practicing mindfulness, to name just a few. Through these things, I began to relieve the very real pressure that compulsive behaviors are an attempt to resolve.

That was how Sinner got his first taste of anything other than the froth on his father's ale. It made you grimace, but if you drank enough it felt like discovering an entire hidden room in your own house that you'd never even known about. You wanted to do more than poke your head through the doorway. You wanted to take its dimensions.

Beer for breakfast, ale for lunch, stout with dinner and a few mugs in between. The average Northern European, including women and children drank three liters of beer a day. That's almost two six-packs, but often the beer had a much higher alcoholic content. People in positions of power, like the police, drank much more. Finnish soldiers were given a ration of five liters of strong ale a day (about as much as seven six-packs). Monks in Sussex made do with 12 cans worth.

I’m a little bit in love with you.” I might have. I made such pronouncements all the time when I was lit, because most women walked around with their self-esteem around their ankles, and I felt a duty to help them lift it up. You are really pretty. Did I ever tell you about the time you ordered the wine in perfect French? Alcohol turned all my jealousy into buttercream.

Alcohol robbed me of the ability to see others—like Marc—and understand what they might be feeling or going through. Drinking to escape was profoundly selfish, and all those unresolved resentments and worries metastasized while I drank to ignore them.

Not taking a drink was easy. Just a matter of muscle movement, the simple refusal to put alcohol to my lips. The impossible part was everything else. How could I talk to people? Who would I be? What would intimacy look like, if it weren’t coaxed out by the glug-glug of a bottle of wine or a pint of beer? Would I have to join AA? Become one of those frightening 12-step people? How the fuck could I write? My livelihood, my identity, my purpose, my light—all extinguished with the tightening of a screw cap.

I was born three drinks short of comfortable...'" "But I knew what that guy meant about the way he was born three drinks short. It made me think about the first beer I ever drank, down at North Beach with a bunch of kids one summer night. It made me think about that first exquisite relief. It made me think about my ex-husband, Scott, who always said I should stop after the third drink. "That's when you get out of control," he'd say. I had no idea what we was talking about. After a couple of drinks is when I start to feel IN control.

Miss Glory went on to say that the doctor had taken all her lady organs. I reasoned that a pig organ's included the lungs, heart, and liver, so if Mrs. Cullinan was walking around without those essentials, it explained why she drank alcohol out of unmarked bottles. She was keeping herself embalmed.

Well, since alcohol is anti-microbial, that is to say, deadly to germs, humans who drank that instead of water would die at a much lower rate from waterborne pathogens – which, prior to industrial water treatment and purification, were ubiquitous. And so the booze hounds would proliferate, out-surviving and out-reproducing the water-drinkers. Alcoholism may actually be an adaptation. Yes, that would mean the bugs on this planet have bred an entire race of booze hounds. Ain’t evolution a bitch?

Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.

You could drink hard liquor in the middle of a school day without people assuming you were an alcoholic underachiever. Strange how in America in the 1950s, at the height of its industrial and imperial power, men drank double-martinis for lunch. Now, in its decline, they drank fizzy water. Somewhere something had gone terribly wrong.

Every morning Mrs Eglantine sat at the round bamboo bar of the New Pacific Hotel and drank her breakfast. This consisted of two quick large brandies, followed by several slower ones. By noon breakfast had become lunch and by two o'clock the pouches under and above Mrs Eglantine's bleared blue eyes began to look like large puffed pink prawns.

A young man in a white coat was pouring some rich fragrant liquid into her cup. She accepted it with gratitude and resignation, for it was strong and bitter, almost medicinal, and as she drank she was conscious that it was doing her good. Tea is more healthy than alcohol and much cheaper, she reflected, and there must be thousands of people who know this.

To me sobriety is a gift from God to me. If I drank, it would be giving the gift back.

Woland silently raised his class and clinked with Margarita. Margarita drank obediently, thinking that this alcohol would be the end of her. But nothing bad happened

He knew about alcohol, nothing about this. He could drink and he could stop. Others couldn’t and drank themselves dead. Personal biochemistry. Fate. “I

She wept and suffered, and finally, when Father had left the house again, she went to one of her secret places where a bottle was, and drank a tunnel away from the pain.

Adrien drank very little. Alcohol affected immortals far more than humans or vampires.

Bob neither smoked nor drank. In public or at professional events, if he felt he had to consume alcohol, he would sometimes order one drink and nurse it for the duration of the event.

if alcohol made you happy, every time you drank you should be full of happiness. Let me ask you, from a purely physiological perspective, how could alcohol possibly make you happy? The effect of alcohol is to deaden all of your senses, to numb you, to inebriate you. If you are numb, how can you feel anything, happiness included? Surely you are not happy every time you drink. None of us are proud of everything we have said or done while drinking. Yet in the moment we believe we are on top of the world, saying and doing anything we please, deluding ourselves into thinking it’s making us happy. Are you happy when the room starts to spin, or your dinner comes back up? Is the drunk on the street in Vegas who has lost his home and his family to booze truly happy? You might take issue with this and tell me that

Lady Margaret's icy blue eyes were enough to give Charity chills -- but the brandy in the cut-glass decanter was enough to melt the polar ice caps. Each time she drank, Charity could feel the warmth all the way down to her toes.

Given the two six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon you drank, I’d say that by midshift your blood alcohol concentration must have been around 0.2 percent, leaving you in no condition to notice any disturbance, much less investigate it.

People who quit drinking become terrified they will lose their power. They believe booze makes them the people they want to be...Alcohol is one hell of a pitchman, and perhaps his greatest lie is convincing us we need him, even as he tears us apart.

I have never seen anyone drink like he did. To say he drank with a vengeance is almost understating it: it was almost as if there was a thirst there, a deep and insatiable craving that made the man keep going back for more and more until he sat down in one corner with a bottle.

Lucy preferred gin and tonics during the summer and switched over to whiskey sours in the winter. At dinner, a sit-down affair with the family, Lucy drank whatever the Temerlins drank, including expensive French wines. "She never gets obnoxious, even when smashed to the brink of unconsciousness," wrote Maurice, revealing more about the chimp's alcoholism than perhaps he intended. At one point, he tried to wean Lucy off the good stuff and onto Boone's Farm apple wine. Assuming she would delight in the fruity swill, he purchased a case and filled her glass one night at dinner. Lucy took a sip of the apple wine, noticed her parents were drinking something else, and put her glass down. She then graabbed Maurice's glass of Chablis and polished it off. She finished Jane's next. Not another sip of Boone's farm ever touched her lips.

And the nature of their suspicion has a long history: the Greek poet Alcaeus of Mytilene coined a popular phrase En oino álétheia (In wine there is the truth), which was repeated by the Roman Pliny the Elder as In vino veritas. The Babylonian Talmud contains a passage in the same spirit: “In came wine, out went a secret.” It later advises, “In three things is a man revealed: in his wine goblet, in his purse, and in his wrath.” The Roman historian Tacitus claimed that the Germanic peoples always drank alcohol while holding councils to prevent anyone from lying.

He took a drink of the juice and cursed. "What is this shit? Poison?" Nykyrian took his acerbic tone in stride. "You can't live on alcohol." "Wanna bet?" "Wanna die?" Nykyrian pushed the juice back toward Syn. "Drink it and quit bitching." Syn mouthed those words back mockingly and added an extremely obscene insult to it. "You know, you're a little hairy to be my mother." He pulled out a small flask and added it to the juice. Nykyrian let out a deep, fierce growl that actually scared her. Syn ignored it as he drank the alcohol-laced juice. "Much better." -Syn & Nykyrian

There are various reasons why an individual might habitually consume large quantities of alcohol, but they all effectively boil down to the same thing. Five years ago, my business partner was a happy drunk. Three years later, he had become a moody drunk. And by the last summer, he was fumbling at the knob of the door to alcoholism. As with most habitual drinkers, he was nice-enough, regular-if-not-exactly-sharp kind of guy. He thought so too. That's why he drank. Because it seemed that with alcohol in his syste, he could more fully embody this idea of being that kind of guy.

It is only now that we can, following Khoury, speak of a Global Standard Eater, because it is only now that humans have come to eat in such startlingly similar ways. Perhaps the biggest change is in the quantities that we eat – around 500 calories on average more per day than our equivalents in the 1960s (from 2,237 calories in 1961 to 2,756 calories in 2009). The Global Standard Eater consumes a whole lot more of almost everything than most eaters of the past. From the 1960s, we started to eat more refined grains and more fat, we drank more alcohol and, quite simply, we ate much more food.

These guys were way too enabled by the false intimacy of the Internet, which allowed you to toss out come-ons you would never utter if you were staring into another person’s eyes. The frightening reality of another human being, the frightening reality of our imperfect and stuttering selves. How much technology has been designed to avoid this? We’re all looking for ways to be close at a distance. Alcohol bridged the gap for me, the way the Internet bridges the gap for others. But maybe everyone needs to stop trying to leap over these fucking gaps and accept how scary it is to be real and vulnerable in the world.

Yep! I was twenty-six years old and an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America, and that’s all that most people knew about me. But beneath the surface, I was full of secrets: I was an addict, for one. A pillhead! I was also an alcoholic-in-training who drank warm Veuve Clicquot after work, alone in my boss’s office with the door closed; a conniving uptown doctor shopper who haunted twenty-four-hour pharmacies while my coworkers were at home watching True Blood in bed with their boyfriends; a salami-and-provolone-puking bulimic who spent a hundred dollars a day on binge foods when things got bad (and they got bad often); a weepy, wobbly hallucination-prone insomniac who jumped six feet in the air à la LeBron James and gobbled Valium every time a floorboard squeaked in her apartment; a tweaky self-mutilator who sat in front of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, digging gory abscesses into her bikini line with Tweezerman Satin Edge Needle Nose Tweezers;

As with most habitual drinkers, he was a nice enough, regular-if-not-exactly-sharp kind of guy when sober. Everyone thought of him as a nice-enough, regular-if-not-exactly-sharp kind of guy. He thought so too. That's why he drank. Because it seemed that with alcohol in his system, he could more fully embody this idea of being that kind of guy.

He tried to get help from the VA but he couldn’t, as so many other returning soldiers have discovered. He suffered terribly—nightmares, insomnia, flashbacks. He drank too much to mask these symptoms, and unfortunately alcohol only exacerbated the condition. It’s called post-traumatic stress and it is a recognized psychiatric disorder. It was around long before we had such a serious-sounding clinical name for it. In the Civil War, it was called a ‘soldier’s heart,’ which I think is the most accurate of the descriptions; in World War One, it was ‘shell shock,’ and during World War Two, ‘battle fatigue.’ In other words, war changes every soldier, but it has always profoundly damaged some of them.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair. These concepts are very familiar to most alcoholics; the common reaction to them is amusement. Substance-abusing writers are just substance abusers—common garden-variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I’ve heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons. It doesn’t matter if you’re James Jones, John Cheever, or a stewbum snoozing in Penn Station; for an addict, the right to the drink or drug of choice must be preserved at all costs. Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.

Hart having arrived before them, insisted they lift at least one glass to old Mrs. McCray. "May she, her husband, and our father be bullying one another in the great beyond." "I hope they enjoy it", Mac said lifting his glass. His cut crystal goblet held tea, not whiskey. Mac now drank no alcohol of any kind. "Confusion to them all," Cam said, joining the toast.

He drank a good deal at times. But the alcohol did not seem to affect him. His stony expression never changed. But sometimes a strange, flashing glance from his cold eyes would rest upon Anna, full of some burning fierceness that was like hatred, and he would force her to drink with him, force her to swallow a little glassful of fiery spirit at a single gulp. 'I ought to shoot you, really,' he said to her once, in a dead voice. 'Conscientiously, it would be the best thing for me to do.' She saw from the grave concentration on his face that his conscience did actually require him to kill her. And this puzzled her because she could not understand why her death should be a conscientious necessity. The thought of being shot did not seem to cause her any concern.

Entertaining is not my area of expertise, I’ll admit that, but surely, if you are a host, you are responsible for ensuring that your guests are provided with a libation? That’s a basic principle of hospitality, in all societies and cultures, and has been since recorded time. In the event, I drank tap water—I rarely imbibe alcohol in public. I only really enjoy it when I’m alone, at home.

The support many Progressives lent to Prohibition reflected that naiveté, and though the Progressive Movement began to dissipate during World War I, Prohibition can be seen as Progressivism’s last gasp. The temperance movement was driven by the conviction that not only did alcohol destroy physical and mental health when it came to regular consumption, it also destroyed the moral compasses of those who drank it. In the same vein, it was believed that moderate consumption eventually led to compulsive use and ultimately addiction.

I eventually got a handle on the drinking. It happens as you get older. It happens, or you don’t get older. Drink hard in your twenties and you’re a regular, fun guy. Keep drinking hard through your thirties and you start to separate yourself from fun, health and indeed other people. If you’re still doing it in your forties it’s probably because you have unresolved stresses and problems which you are clumsily and destructively self-medicating. Drinking hard into your fifties means that you’re blowing hot and cold on ever seeing your sixties. I woke up a week after my fiftieth birthday unable to remember the previous three days, and decided to stop. I could say ‘simple as that’, except that it really wasn’t simple at all. There was a clincher, though, and it was this: my main rationale for drinking was to calm myself in the face of my night terrors. But although I drank a lot, the nightmares refused to go away. I tried a few weeks of facing them without the alcohol, and though the terrors were no better they were certainly not worse. So I quit drinking.

And yet, right then, as I stood among my father’s friends and acquaintances drinking Mike’s free beer in Sam Hall’s honor, waves of panic as physically tangible as abdominal nausea crashed over me. It wasn’t that I needed Sam Hall for anything specific. I’d have been satisfied to know that his consciousness had somehow been saved, that his essence was being kept alive in some jar on a shelf somewhere, that he continued to be. Of such fears, I thought as I drank off the rest of my beer in a gulp, are religions born. Also alcoholics.

Keisha was a twenty-seven-year-old occupational therapist who strutted into the Murray Hill bar where they were meeting, ordered two Kamikazes, despite him saying, “Actually, no, I’m not really into—” and so drank both herself, then yelped a “Whoo!” and later, after four more drinks, wrapped her arm around his neck and a leg around his waist and told him to take her home. He couldn’t. “Come on, what’s wrong with this?” The this, she made clear, looking down, was her body on his, and he ached so badly for her but how could he? How could he take advantage of this young girl who was positively soaked in alcohol? He went home and masturbated, but he couldn’t come.

at first, it was the sotry of a dead woman walking, of all the women in this world who try to conform to a life they are told they should want- one that looks good on paper. I drank green juice and I made the right sounds when I fucked men I didn't really like and I crushed it in the boardroom and traveled to Central America all by myself and my ass was yoga tight. I did all the right things until all the right things became so suffocating I would up prostrate, drunk, on the floor of my apartment. It then became the journey of a woman waking up to the world and all its possibilities and wonder, her own power and voice and unique identity, the bigness that a life can be when we center it on ourtrue desires, compared to the smallness of one we accept when we center it on the desires we're supposed to have.

One day, about 3:30 in the afternoon, I was walking along the sidewalk opposite the beach at Copacabana past a bar. I suddenly got this treMENdous, strong feeling: "That's just what I want; that'll fit just right. I'd just love to have a drink right now!" I started to walk into the bar, and I suddenly thought to myself, "Wait a minute! It's the middle of the afternoon. There's nobody here. There's no social reason to drink. Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that you have to have a drink?" — and I got scared. I never drank again, since then. I suppose I really wasn't in any danger, because I found it very easy to stop. But that strong feeling that I didn't understand frightened me. You see, I get such fun out of thinking that I don't want destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick.

Opiates don't only relieve physical pain, they also relieve emotional pain. It turns out that the same part of the brain that experiences the suffering of physical pain also experiences the suffering of social rejection, for example. The sources and pathways of the pain are different, but the suffering is experienced in the same part of the brain, where opiate receptors are abudantly present. And if you look at alcohol, it's a pain-reliever. In fact, you know, the old saying, when someone drank too much they used to say "he's feeling no pain". Cocaine.. is a local anesthetic it numbs nerve endings. Cannabis has pain-relieving qualities. All the behaviors of addiction, whether they are substance-related or not, either directly soothe pain, emotional pain, or they distract from it. So my mantra and the first question in addiction is not "why the addiction?", but "why the pain?" And if want to understand why people have pain, you got to look at their lives, not at their genes, not at their choices, but what actually happened to them.

Perhaps that was just a hunch." Barbee shivered again. He knew that he himself possessed what he called the "nose for news" - an intuitive perception of human motivations and the impending events that would spring from them. It wasn't a faculty he could analyze or account for, but he knew that it wasn't unusual. Most successful reporters possessed it, he believed - even though, in an age of skepticism for everything except mechanistic materialism, they wisely denied it. That dim sense had been useful to him - on those summer field trips, before Mendrick turned him out, it had led him to more than one promising prehistoric site, simply because he somehow knew where a band of wild hunters would prefer to camp, or to dig a comrade's grave. Commonly, however, that uncontrolled faculty had been more curse than blessing. It made him too keenly aware of all that people thought and did around him, kept him troubled with an uneasy alertness. Except when he was drunk. He drank too much, and knew that many other newsmen did. That vague sensitivity, he believed; was half the reason.

Compared to his experience, I wasn't an alcoholic -- he'd seen a real rinker, and I didn't look anything like that. But the older I got, the more complicated my habit became. I started to drink to fall asleep, to feel confident, to write. I began to drink well -- I learned how to make sure nobody ever really knew I'd been drinking at all. I drank to feel included, and I drank if it was offered. I drank to break the ice; I drank to spark real talk. I drank to hit on boys, and I drank to justify kissing them. Drinking could open a strange gateway to vulnerability. I drank because it gave me the illusion of control. I drank to justify intentional fuckery, knowing I could always circumvent real accountability by blaming it on too much of whatever I'd had the night before. I drank because I could escape from my anxiety and my worries and my hang-ups and everything that held me back. And I drank because I liked it. Because that's the thing: I liked it. Drinking was my favorite pastime and my costume. For a few solid hours, I got to convince myself (and everybody I met) that I was really much better than my actual self -- a shiny, full-color version.

Yep! I was twenty-six years old and an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America, and that’s all that most people knew about me. But beneath the surface, I was full of secrets: I was an addict, for one. A pillhead! I was also an alcoholic-in-training who drank warm Veuve Clicquot after work, alone in my boss’s office with the door closed; a conniving uptown doctor shopper who haunted twenty-four-hour pharmacies while my coworkers were at home watching True Blood in bed with their boyfriends; a salami-and-provolone-puking bulimic who spent a hundred dollars a day on binge foods when things got bad (and they got bad often); a weepy, wobbly hallucination-prone insomniac who jumped six feet in the air à la LeBron James and gobbled Valium every time a floorboard squeaked in her apartment; a tweaky self-mutilator who sat in front of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, digging gory abscesses into her bikini line with Tweezerman Satin Edge Needle Nose Tweezers; a slutty and self-loathing downtown party girl fellatrix rushing to ruin; and—perhaps most of all—a lonely weirdo who felt like she was underwater all of the time. My brains were so scrambled you could’ve ordered them for brunch at Sarabeth’s; I let art-world guys choke me out during unprotected sex; I only had one friend, a Dash Snow–wannabe named Marco who tried to stick syringes in my neck and once slurped from my nostrils when I got a cocaine nosebleed;

In the valleys, it was already night, lamps coming on in the mossy, textured loam, the fresh-smelling darkness expanding, unfolding its foliage. The three of them drank Old Monk, watched as the black climbed all the way past their toes and their knees, the cabbage-leafed shadows reaching out and touching them on their cheeks, noses, enveloping their faces. The black climbed over the tops of their heads and on to extinguish Kachenjunga glowing a last brazen pornographic pink... each of them separately remembered how many evenings they'd spent like this... how unimaginable it was that they would soon come to an end. Here Sai had learned how music, alcohol, and friendship together could create a grand civilization. "Nothing so sweet, dear friends -" Uncle Potty would say raising his glass before he drank. There were concert halls in Europe to which Father Booty would soon return, opera houses where music molded entire audiences into a single grieving or celebrating heart, and where the applause rang like a downpour... But could they feel as they did here? Hanging over the mountain, hearts half empty-half full, longing for beauty, for innocence that now knows. With passion for the beloved or for the wide world or for worlds beyond this one... Sai thought of how it had been unclear to her what exactly she longed for in the early days at Cho Oyu, that only the longing itself found its echo in her aching soul. The longing was gone now, she thought, and the ache seemed to have found its substance.

What if she had already done it to herself? What if she had shaved away from the surface of her brain whatever synaptic interlacings had formed her gift? She remembered reading somewhere that some pop artist once bought an original drawing by Michelangelo—and had taken a piece of art gum and erased it, leaving blank paper. The waste had shocked her. Now she felt a similar shock as she imagined the surface of her own brain with the talent for chess wiped away. At home she tried a Russian game book, but she couldn’t concentrate. She started going through her game with Foster, setting the board up in the kitchen, but the moves of it were too painful. That damned Stonewall, and the hastily pushed pawn. A patzer’s move. Bad chess. Hungover chess. The telephone rang, but she didn’t answer. She sat at the board and wished for a moment, painfully, that she had someone to call. Harry Beltik would be back in Louisville. And she didn’t want to tell him about the game with Foster. He would find out soon enough. She could call Benny. But Benny had been icy after Paris, and she did not want to talk to him. There was no one else. She got up wearily and opened the cabinet next to the refrigerator, took down a bottle of white wine and poured herself a glassful. A voice inside her cried out at the outrage, but she ignored it. She drank half of it in one long swallow and stood waiting until she could feel it. Then she finished the glass and poured another. A person could live without chess. Most people did. When she awoke on the sofa the next morning, still wearing the Paris clothes she had worn when losing the game to Foster, she was frightened in a new way. She could sense her brain being physically blurred by alcohol, its positional grasp gone clumsy, its penetration clouded. But after breakfast she showered and changed and then poured herself a glass of wine. It was almost mechanical; she had learned to cut off thought as she did it. The main thing was to eat some toast first, so the wine wouldn’t burn her stomach. She kept drinking for days, but the memory of the game she had lost and the fear of what she was doing to the sharp edge of her gift would not go away, except when she was so drunk that she could not even think. There was a piece in the Sunday paper about her, with one of the pictures taken that morning at the high school, and a headline reading CHESS CHAMP DROPS FROM TOURNEY. She threw the paper away without reading the article. Then one morning after a night of dark and confusing dreams she awoke with an unaccustomed clarity: if she did not stop drinking immediately she would ruin what she had. She had allowed herself to sink into this frightening murk. She had to find a foothold somewhere to push herself free of it. She would have to get help.

It was raining again the next morning, a slanting gray rain like a swung curtain of crystal beads. I got up feeling sluggish and tired and stood looking out of the windows, with a dark, harsh taste of Sternwoods still in my mouth. I was as empty of life as a scarecrow's pockets. I went out to the kitchenette and drank two cups of black coffee. You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women.

In the years that followed I worked as much as I could filling my empty hours with theatres and alcohol. I found I had grown to like the taste. Maybe that was a lie. I never liked the taste except maybe of whisky. I drank it none the less and it numbed any feelings I had for a time. In my sober hours I was introduced to ‘The Order of the Red Dragon’ a little at a time.

An officer pulled over a driver Officer: This man is drunk Man: Officer, I have had no wine or alcohol Officer: So why are you speaking like that? Man: Cuz, I have been praying in the spirit Officer: You drank some spirit Man: Am filled with it, Officer Officer: Bastard Officer performed breath analyzer test Officer: Spirit was not detected. Did you camouflage it? Man: Oh no, Officer. You cannot hide the Holy Spirit. Officer: Jesus Man: It's contagious Officer: Jesus Ephesians 5:18 And be not drunk with alcohol or wine, wherein in excess; but be filled with the Holy Spirit.

The nights of the days that I drank I slept calm. As if the last rejection was the next one

He drank a quarter of the drink, then topped off the glass with more Jim Beam. Joe was not much of a drinker anymore, although he’d done more than his share in college and when he worked with Vern. But his intake of alcohol always increased proportionately when his mother-in-law was around.

THOUGH I WENT to a very artsy private high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I wasn’t raised by parents with a liberal attitude toward alcohol. There was no whimsical “sip of wine at Thanksgiving” for us kids while we were still teenagers, like we were in a Noah Baumbach movie. That was for the cool Jewish kids. This was the Clinton era, and my parents were already worried about the moral deterioration of the country. So I drank skim milk with dinner, and did so pretty much every night until I was a story editor at The Office.

I don’t drink alcohol even when I’m not in the family way. Never have.” “Never?” “Nope.” “Never drank once in all your life? That’s impossible.” “It’s partly a religious decision. I’m a Mormon. From Utah, you know.” He stared, mouth slightly agape. “How many wives does your husband know.”have?” “Oh please. Mormons aren’t polygamists.” “Yes they are,” the driver piped up. He wore one of those cliché chauffeur hats low over his eyes. “Everyone knows. The men have loads of wives, make them all wear bonnets.” Becky sighed and gave her speech. “Some Mormons were polygamists in the nineteenth century, but they gave up the practice in 1890. There are small religious groups around the Utah area who practice polygamy, but they have nothing to do with the LDS Church.” “That’s not what I saw on TV. Mormons, they said. Polygamists. Loads of ’em.” “I am a Mormon, from Utah, lived there my entire thirty-four years, and I’ve never met a polygamist.” The driver straightened the Mets plush baseball that dangled from the rearview mirror. “You must not get out much.” “Yes, that must be it.” “It’s tragic really,” Felix said. “She’s agoraphobic and hadn’t been out of the house in, what was it, fifteen years?” “Sixteen,” Becky said. “Right, sixteen. Last time was when Charles and Diana wed.” “You’re thinking of the last time I leaned out the window. The last time I actually left the house was for a sale at Sears.” “Of course, the day you bought those trousers. Sixteen years later, here she is! And in the same trousers, but still . . . We’re so proud of our little Becky!” Felix patted her head. “You dug deep, but you found the courage to step out of that door.” “I did like you told me, Felix. I just shut my eyes and chanted, ‘The polygamists are not going to eat me, they’re not going to eat me,’ and I wasn’t afraid anymore.” “She is a rare example of true bravery. Don’t you agree?” “Uh, yeah,” said the driver. “Congratulations.” “Thanks.” Becky smiled politely. “Go Mets.” The driver snorted.

Admittedly, I drank heavily. I could drink any man under the table. But when it came to my two jobs—being a mother and a nurse—drinking didn’t affect either one. I wasn’t an alcoholic.

The drinking, the skipping school – all of it – was about regaining some sort of control. That night I felt there just might be enough magic in the world to help me through constant upheaval and loss. What I didn’t realize was that the more I drank, the less in control I was.

But I also stayed up weeknights after they had retired and drank myself into bed. My thinking about drinking had undergone a great change. Liquor had become a crutch on the one hand and a means of retreat from life on the other.

Alcohol hooks you through its addictive and dehydrating nature. Again, this is a physiological fact. Before you drank alcohol, you didn’t miss it; you didn’t think about it. You were happy and free.

You try to abstain completely on certain days or drink less per day. This is a critical change. Before this point you haven’t questioned each and every drink. You drank what you wanted, when you wanted and didn’t give it much thought. I definitely didn’t think about how much I was drinking. I just drank. Since alcohol has now caused an issue—enough of one for someone in your life to call you out on your drinking—it would seem you should want to drink less. Consciously you do. Unfortunately, your unconscious has not gotten the message, and it still desires alcohol, believing it is your key to enjoying social situations and relaxing. You abstain and feel bored, annoyed, or

I could always tell when my mom drank because the corners of her mouth fell down. Alcohol took her smile. Strange, because I never drank, but it took mine too.

If a woman drank too much, it was probably because she wasn't fulfilling all her domestic duties. If a man drank too much, it was probably his wife's fault for not fulfilling all her domestic duties. . . . Many so-called experts of the 1950s believed that alcohol abuse was a manifestation of failed gender performance. Which almost shakes out, considering that trying to conform to the role of a perfect 1950s housewife would make any woman want to have a drink.

addiction is a much bigger stressor than the stressors you drank to remove. You’ve created a mental craving for alcohol that did not exist before, one that you now have to either feed (with more alcohol) or deprive. Wanting something you shouldn’t have does nothing to relax you; it creates a mental divide inside your mind, which is the very definition of frustration and agitation. It’s the opposite of relaxation.

When he was a drinker, he drank with his entire mind. He didn’t doubt or question every drink. If drinking a little was good, drinking a lot was better. This commitment is both what pushed him to become dependent on alcohol and what ultimately helped him find freedom.

but Cha-Cha thought the word was too clinical to truly convey the sort of secret, sad drinker Francis was. He took no joy in his drinking. It was as if he drank to punish himself for some misdeed.

my early twenties I was wine-obsessed, and not in the way where I drank a lot of wine (which I did), but more in the way where I absolutely dominated wine. It was a status symbol, something I curated like