Charles R. Jackson > Quotes

“THE barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.”
― Charles R. Jackson, The Lost Weekend

“All the woeful errors of childhood and adolescence came to their crashing climax at seventeen. They gathered themselves for a real workout in the passionate hero-worship of an upperclassman during his very first month at college, a worship that led, like a fatal infatuation, to scandal and public disgrace, because no one had understood or got the story straight and no one had wanted to understand, least of all the upperclassman who emerged somehow as a hero, now, to the others—why, he would never know. . . . He had survived (didn’t one always?).”
― Charles R. Jackson, The Lost Weekend

“LIKE a fish of the deep rising to the surface of bright air and sun, he swam up to consciousness out of a dead blank into a whiter world than he had ever seen.”
― Charles R. Jackson, The Lost Weekend

“Here at this desk, this night, one of life’s important moments had occurred. Humbly, almost unaware, certainly innocent, he had sat there and been the instrument by which a poem was transmitted to paper. He was awed and truly humble, for all that he must look in the mirror to see if the experience registered in his face. Often tears came genuinely to his eyes. How had it come about—why should it have been he? he asked himself in humility and gratitude. He read the poem in fear and read it again. Now it was fine; would it be so tomorrow?”
― Charles R. Jackson, The Lost Weekend

“an untimely extension of the interminable slow pain of growing up, retarded,”
― Charles R. Jackson, The Lost Weekend