Stefan B

“(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

“Sera downs all the liquor and half the beer almost immediately. She pushes her glass forward to indicate that she’s ready for another. In lieu of working she has decided to drink a lot tonight. This is one of those rare times when everything seems to be getting to her. The normally undefined craving for companionship is making itself known to her and she doesn’t like it. She feels strange, older. The incident with the security guard has disturbed her more than she can admit to herself. She cannot accept that she needs to be, at least at some deeply hidden level, or even in some insignificant way, accepted, validated like a parking ticket, punched.”
― 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

“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