Catherine > Catherine's Quotes

“We are not idealized wild things.
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as
the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can't even cry.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

In Memoriam A.H.H. Section 5”
― Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam

“Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.”
― Mark Twain

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.”
― David Sedaris, Naked

“I think the warning labels on alcoholic beverages are too bland. They should be more vivid. Here is one I would suggest: "Alcohol will turn you into the same asshole your father was.”
― George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

“I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I automatically assume people won't like me, so I don't talk to them unless they approach me first. I can't become a part of a crowd because I can't get past that feeling that I don't belong.”
― Stephanie Kuehnert, Ballads of Suburbia

“For the first twenty years of my life, I rocked myself to sleep. It was a harmless enough hobby, but eventually, I had to give it up. Throughout the next twenty-two years I lay still and discovered that after a few minutes I could drop off with no problem. Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it’s funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own. Often I never even made it to the bed. I’d squat down to pet the cat and wake up on the floor eight hours later, having lost a perfectly good excuse to change my clothes. I’m now told that this is not called “going to sleep” but rather “passing out,” a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgment.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“To alcohol! The cause of... and solution to... all of life's problems”
― Matt Groening

“Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you'll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common.”
― David Sedaris, Naked

“The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“Drunken men give some of the best pep talks.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“What is this thing you call substance abuse?
All I wanna do is forget and get loose.
Drinking and smoking over and over
What's so great about a life that's sober?

There's nothing cool about being young
When the monsters of night have stolen the sun.

I'm tired of searching for words in the sky.
All I wanna do is drink and die.
Nothing is real. It's all a big lie.
All I wanna do is drink and die.

There's nothing cool about being young
When the monsters of night have stolen the sun.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster

“There was nothing glorious about the life of a drinker or the life of a writer.”
― Charles Bukowski, Hot Water Music

“To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.”
― Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story

“Squiffy, have you ever felt a sort of strange emptiness in the heart? A sort of aching void of the soul?'

'Oh, rather!'

'What do you do about it?'

'I generally take a couple of cocktails.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Doctor Sally

“The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorselessly tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted and fragile. He is in no state to engage with anything significant. It is of course impossible to read, for a sincere book would demand not only time, but also a clear emotional lawn around the text in which associations and anxieties could emerge and be disentangled. He will perhaps only ever do one thing well in his life.

For this particular combination of tiredness and nervous energy, the sole workable solution is wine. Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.”
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

“Come, drunks and drug-takers; come perverts unnerved!
Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit; to whom
and wherever deserved.

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless
And it isn't for you.”
― Louise Bogan, The Blue Estuaries

“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

“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.”
― Nina Kiriki Hoffman, A Stir of Bones

“No one ever found any answers at the bottom of a bottle. Not the point, of course. The point of reaching the bottom of the bottle is generally to forget the questions.”
― C.J. Tudor, The Chalk Man

“He died at forty-two.

I was there to collect his talent.

I was there at the hospital deathbed of my beloved Billie Holiday, just forty-four, her liver destroyed by drinking; I was there inside the hotel room of Charlie Parker, my singular jazz saxophonist, who died in his midthirties, but whose body was so ravaged by drugs the coroners thought he was sixty.

Tommy Dorsey, the bandleader, choked in his sleep when he was fifty-one, too deep in pills to awaken. Johnny Allen Hendrix (you called him Jimi) swallowed a handful of barbiturates and expired. He was twenty-seven.

It is not new, this idea that a purer art awaits you in a substance. But it is naive. I existed before the first grapes were fermented. Before the first whiskey was distilled. Be it opium or absinthe, marijuana or heroin, cocaine or ecstasy or whatever will follow, you may alter your state, but you will not alter this truth: I am Music. I am here inside you. Why would I hide behind a powder or a vapor?

Do you think me so petty?”
― Mitch Albom, The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

“You enter the cave of the bear to become its master or its meat.”
― Kerry Cue, Forgotten Wisdom

“Watching a parent die is a terrible task. My father, faced with something he could not talk down or browbeat into submission, spent his days with the bottle, as if he determined to drink himself to death, as if his alcohol could hold back the disease that swept through his brain.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste