Stefan B

“It dawns on him that he has crossed over the line that runs between maintaining alcoholic and sloppy, stupid, obnoxious drunk. But at least he is cognizant of it this time; he’ll try to ease off. “Oh, thank you, but I don’t think so. I’ll just finish my drink and go. I have to get up pretty early tomorrow,” she says. They get their drinks and both take long swallows. By now Ben is obscured from himself. He can no longer monitor his actions. He can’t edit himself. Later he will know, but right now he doesn’t, that this is not him. “I really wish that you’d come home with me,” he says, slurring and breaking his words. “Yourso cute, and I’m really good in bed… believe me… yousmell good too.” He stops and frowns. “No, okay,” he mutters into his glass. He swivels on his stool and his arms find the bar for support. She starts to speak and then doesn’t. Looking at him, she gets a look of great sadness in her eyes, sadness so intense that it goes beyond what her face has made you believe she could feel. Ben does not see it, but it is not wasted. It serves more purpose to her than it possibly could to him right now; she did not consciously author it, and she is surprised. “Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much,” she says. “I have to go. Thanks for the drink.” She gets up and walks quickly to the door. Her understatement seems to give him a spark. “Maybe I shouldn’t breathe so much, Teri!” he calls after her. “Ha! ha!” But she is gone. The bartender shakes his head and puts down the glass that he is washing. “Time to go, bud,” he says. “We’re closing up.”
― John O'Brien, Leaving Las Vegas

“I want peace, he thinks to himself late at night. I want peace. But then he dreams of fistfights.”
― David Benioff, The 25th Hour

“(mistaking in his dull, never to be matured mind, her loneliness for respect of his strength and virility)”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn

“The storm which swept me into a hospital in December began as a cloud no bigger than a wine goblet the previous June. And the cloud—the manifest crisis—involved alcohol, a substance I had been abusing for forty years. Like a great many American writers, whose sometimes lethal addiction to alcohol has become so legendary as to provide in itself a stream of studies and books, I used alcohol as the magical conduit to fantasy and euphoria, and to the enhancement of the imagination. There is no need to either rue or apologize for my use of this soothing, often sublime agent, which had contributed greatly to my writing; although I never set down a line while under its influence, I did use it—often in conjunction with music—as a means to let my mind conceive visions that the unaltered, sober brain has no access to. Alcohol was an invaluable senior partner of my intellect, besides being a friend whose ministrations I sought daily—sought also, I now see, as a means to calm the anxiety and incipient dread that I had hidden away for so long somewhere in the dungeons of my spirit.”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness