During college, many of us discovered the momentous occasion known as Thirsty Thursday — along with Wasted Wednesday, Trashed Tuesday, Shit-faced Sunday, etc. Of course, once you’re thrown into the 40-hour work grind otherwise known as The Real World, Messed-up Mondays don’t really fly. But you are still able to drink somewhat responsibly and without judgement each Thursday night. (It’s perhaps scant proof that being a grown-up really isn’t all that bad.)
On this day when all you can think of is the weekend, who better to motivate you than the writers who love a good drink themselves? Here are over a dozen authors who truly know the joys of alcohol ― after all, there’s no better way to treat yo’self after a week of hard work than with a cold pint.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned:
There was a kindliness about intoxication — there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.
James Joyce, Dubliners:
The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.
Emma Straub, Drinking Diaries:
A glass of champagne, simple and perfect. A sign of a good time in progress, a sign of hope and celebration.
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover:
Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.
Dorothy Parker:
One more drink and I’ll be under my host.
Roxane Gay, Inner Geographies:
I’d just drink martinis and snack on the olives and when I really started to feel like crap, I’d eat a bowl of Special K. I learned so much about myself.
Anton Chekhov:
When one longs for a drink, it seems as though one could drink a whole ocean — that is faith; but when one begins to drink, one can only drink altogether two glasses — that is science.
Charles Bukowski, Sunlight Here I Am:
Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.
David Sedaris, Naked:
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.
Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter:
Next to music beer was best.
Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker:
O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow:
Oh, this beer here is cold, cold and hop-bitter, no point coming up for air, gulp, till it's all—hahhhh.
Laura van den Berg, The Isle of Youth:
“Have a sip of this.” She held out her glass. “It’s a medio medio times two.”
I took her drink. The glass was cold and damp and soon my hand went numb.
“I’m finally conscious,” I said to Christina.
Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters 1917-1961:
I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you?
Aside from the expected quotes by Hemingway and Fitzgerald ― two authors who could handle their booze ― were there any quotes that surprised you? Any that made you consider whipping out a flask on the job? Let us know in the comments below! (And maybe talk to someone if you’re hittin’ the bottle at work.)
Freddie Moore is a Brooklyn-based writer. Her full name is Winifred, and her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily and The Huffington Post. As a former cheesemonger, she’s a big-time foodie who knows her cheese. Follow her on Twitter: @moorefreddie
(Image Credits: Flickr Commons, Scott and Zelda Tumblr, Irish Central, Custard Heart Vintage, Drinking Diaries, Wikipedia Commons, JS Online, Chekhov Works, Poetry Foundation, Goodreads, Goodreads, Goodreads, Penn State, American Gentleman)
This blog post about food (booze is a kind of food, right?) is brought to you by Nine Rabbits, the bestselling novel by Virginia Zaharieva now available from Black Balloon Publishing.
About the Book:
A restless writer's fiery enthusiasm for her family's culinary traditions defines her from childhood to passionate adulthood as she strives for a life less ordinary. Lush gardens, nostalgic meals and sensual memories in this novel/cookbook are as charming as the narrator herself.
About the Author:
Virginia Zaharieva was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1959. She is a writer, psychotherapist, feminist and mother. Her novel Nine Rabbits is among the most celebrated Bulgarian books to appear over the past two decades and the first of Zaharieva's work available in English.
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