Holden Drinking Quotes

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and they're pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody's be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. You'd have an overcoat this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you'd have a new partner. Or you'd have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you'd heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way—I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.

Lawyers are alright, I guess — but it doesn't appeal to me", I said. "I mean they're alright if they go around saving innocent guys' lives all the time, and like that, but you don't do that kind of stuff if you're a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides, even if you did go around saving guys' lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys' lives, or because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in the dirty movies? How would you know you weren't being a phony? The trouble is you wouldn't.

Oh, it’s a little worse than that,” he said, nettled. “It makes you the illegitimate son of the senior Republican senator from South Dakota. And the press will eat you alive when it comes out. You, Leta, me, everyone our lives touch. Including Cecily. She’ll make a damned great sidebar, with her anthropology degree!” “You’ll lose face with your constituents,” Tate said coldly. “Oh, to hell with that! Maybe I’ll lose my job, so what?” Holden said, glaring at him. “It wouldn’t matter if your mother would speak to me! She cut me off before I got two complete sentences out. She wouldn’t come out here and help me tell you the truth. She hung up on me!” “Good for her! What a pity she didn’t try that thirty-six years ago.” The older man’s eyes darkened. “I loved her,” he said very quietly. “I still love her. I made the mistake of my life when I thought money and power would be worth marrying a vicious damned socialite who could help me politically. Your mother was worth ten of my late wife. I never knew what hell was until I tried to live with the devil’s deal I made to get my office.” He turned away again and sat down on the sofa wearily, glancing at the beer. “You shouldn’t drink,” he said absently. Tate ignored him. He picked up the beer, finished it with pure spite and crushed the empty can. “Aren’t you leaving now?” he asked the other man with biting contempt. Holden let out a long breath. “Where would I go? I live in a big empty house with a Jacuzzi and two Siamese cats. Until a few weeks ago, I thought I had no family left alive.

Leta walked to the door and opened it with a ready smile for Colby Lane. And found herself looking straight into the eye of a man she hadn’t seen face-to-face in thirty-six years. Matt Holden matched her face against his memories of a young, slight, beautiful woman whose eyes loved him every time they looked at him. His heart spun like a cartwheel in his chest. “Cecily said it was Colby,” Leta said unsteadily. “Strange. She phoned me and asked if I was free this evening.” His broad shoulders shrugged and he smiled faintly. “I’m free every evening.” “That doesn’t sound like the life of a playboy widower,” Leta said caustically. “My wife was a vampire,” he said. “She sucked me dry of life and hope. Her drinking wore me down. Her death was a relief for both of us. Do I get to come in?” he added, glancing down the hall. “I’m going to collect dust if I stand out here much longer, and I’m hungry. A sack of McDonald’s hamburgers and fries doesn’t do a lot for me.” “I hear it’s a presidential favorite,” Cecily mused, joining them. “Come in, Senator Holden.” “It was Matt before,” he pointed out. “Or are you trying to butter me up for a bigger donation to the museum?” She shrugged. “Pick a reason.” He looked at Leta, who was uncomfortable. “Well, at least you can’t hang up on me here. You’ll be glad to know that our son isn’t speaking to me. He isn’t speaking to you, either, or so he said,” he added. “I suppose he won’t talk to you?” he added to Cecily. “He said goodbye very finally, after telling me that I was an idiot to think he’d change his mind and want to marry me just because he turned out to have mixed blood,” she said, not relating the shocking intimacy that had prefaced his remarks. “I’ll punch him for that,” Matt said darkly. “Ex-special forces,” Leta spoke up with a faint attempt at humor, nodding toward Matt. “He was in uniform when we went on our first date.” “You wore a white cotton dress with a tiered skirt,” he recalled, “and let your hair down. Hair…” He turned back to Cecily and grimaced. “Good God, what did you do that for?” “Tate likes long hair, that’s what I did it for,” she said, venom in her whole look. “I can’t wait for him to see it, even if I have to settle for sending him a photo!” “I hope you never get mad at me,” Matt said. “Fat chance.

You were just in South Dakota a couple of weeks ago,” he pointed out. “Why didn’t you get it then?” “It wasn’t available then.” She brushed back a tiny strand of loose hair. “Don’t cross-examine me, okay? It’s been a long day.” He ran a hand around the back of his neck, under his braid of hair, and stared at her own hair in the tight bun at her nape as she replaced the errant strand. “I thought you took it down at night.” “At bedtime,” she corrected. His eyes narrowed. “Lucky Colby,” he said deliberately. She wasn’t going to give him any rope to hang her with. She just smiled. He glared at her. “He won’t change,” he said flatly. “I don’t care,” she said. “I appreciate all you’ve done for me, Tate, but my private life is my own business, not yours.” “That’s a hell of a way to talk to me.” “That works both ways,” she replied, eyes narrowing. “What gives you the right to ask questions about the men I date?” Her words made him mad. His lips compressed until they made a straight line. He looked like his father when he was angry. He finished his coffee in a tense silence and got to his feet. He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to go. I just wanted to see how you were.” “You just wanted to see if Colby was here,” she corrected and smiled mirthlessly when he blinked. “You know I don’t approve of Colby,” he told her. “Like I care?” she said. He took a step toward her. His black eyes glittered with conflicting emotions. She aroused him more lately than any woman he’d ever known. Just looking at her sent him over the edge. On some level she recognized the tension in him, the need that he was denying. He was upset about Matt Holden pulling him out of the security work, not because of the money, but rather because it seemed nothing more than spite. Actually Holden was saving them both from a political upheaval because he could have been accused of nepotism. But deeper than that was a frustration because he wanted a woman he couldn’t have. Cecily knew that at some level. He was trying to start a fight. She couldn’t let him. “Colby is a sweet man,” she said gently. “He’s good company and he doesn’t drink around me, ever.” “He’s an alcoholic,” he said quietly, trying to control the anger. “I told you before, he’s in therapy,” she said. “He’s trying, Tate.” “So you expect me not to worry about you? After what my own father put me and my mother through?

Like all professional sailors, Holden had sometimes ended long flights by drinking himself into a stupor. More than once he’d wandered into a brothel and left only when they threw him out with an emptied account, a sore groin, and a prostate as dry as the Sahara desert. So when Amos staggered into his room after three days on station, Holden knew exactly what the big mechanic felt like.

The sky is turning from black to gray and I stop to remember this melancholy moment for my acting. I huddle on a bench in my big thrift-store overcoat and my painful hair, watching my breath make clouds and thinking Holden Caulfield-y thoughts, like how come you never see any baby pigeons? This is what those people on black-and-white French postcards must feel like. I find myself craving a cup of coffee and a cigarette despite the fact that I neither drink coffee nor smoke.

On the phone in the living room, Henry Kissinger, a frequent overnight guest, engages in apparently serious conversation: “Mm. Yes. Yes, undoubtedly.…” Gilruth swoops in to light pine-scented candles and slip a coaster under Kissinger’s drink. Kissinger nods his thanks. Gilruth nods back. They’ve done this before. The music, a comely mingling of rock and jazz standards: “You must remember this.…” The threads of golden sconce light pinging off the roses … The china, gilded with a naked girl riding a centaur, waiting contentedly on a dining room table. Printed linen walls.… Gilruth—handsomely grizzled, William Holden with a tan—whistles while he works. “A sigh is just a sigh.…” “Yes,” Kissinger says. “Yes, goodbye.” Click. “The fun-da-mental things … apply.…” Kissinger stands. “As time”—he croaks on his way to the guest room to change—“goes … by.…

Holden’s mind shifted on most of the questions. More food, more drink, more sleep, more sex. Any sex.

But, in his heart, Holden knew he could not go to the ceremony for fear of embarrassing the President-elect and other VIPs because he was unable to abstain from drinking. So he graciously declined.

That afternoon, Noguchi announced his verdict in the tragic demise of America’s much beloved star, whose inspiring performances had been enjoyed by millions of moviegoers. The next morning, newspapers printed the sensational headline: HOLDEN BLED TO DEATH AFTER A DRUNKEN FALL – and all hell broke loose. People were outraged, not that Holden had been drinking, but that Noguchi felt compelled to tell everybody about it. The sense of rage was compounded by the revelation of personal details about Holden that his family and friends believed should have been kept private. Noguchi disagreed.

That night, they were drinking at the bar with the big game hunter and novelist Robert Ruark, whose recent book about the Mau Mau uprising, titled Something of Value, was an international bestseller. In high spirits, Holden proposed buying the outmoded hotel, which was listed for sale. “Put up or shut up,” said Ruark. “Well, that did it for me,” Holden told Stefanie Powers, as their car bounced along the dusty road. “If I was sober I would not have bought the hotel,” he yelled over the noise of the car’s engine. “But I’m glad I did.

After his Oscar disappointment, Holden fell off the wagon. Powers tried in vain to console him. But her heartfelt concern for the man she loved was not enough to keep him sober. He stopped drinking beer and wine and resumed his daily intake of hard liquor. A heavy suntan no longer concealed the droopy eyes, receding hairline, and leathery skin. Decades of chain-smoking had reduced his melodious voice to a raspy baritone.

In what must surely be considered one of the great lost scripts of history (or a Saturday Night Live sketch), Chase brought his usual sensibility to a trial run, having Kevin discover The Catcher in the Rye and start smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and conversing with the shade of Holden Caulfield.

group of people and handing her drink to her friend Lizzy. Lizzy nodded and smiled as Emma gestured that she was going outside. ‘I’m heading outside,’ Emma shouted into the phone as she began to weave her way through the crowds. ‘Can’t hear anything in here.’ After what seemed like a

Emma’s free hand. ‘You’re far too sober for my liking. I’m in charge tonight, and whatever I say, goes. And I say drink!