“Drink! for you know not when you came, nor why; Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.”

Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! That Youths sweet-scented Manuscript should close!

Don’t cry upon your losses Don’t measure today with tomorows Don’t trust to be passed and coming day believe in now – and be happy today.

Tomorrow! – Why, tomorrow I may be Myself with yesterday’s sev’n thousand years.

Better be jocund with the fruitful Grape Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.

Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make, And ev’n with Paradise devise the snake; For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man Is blackened – Man’s forgiveness give and take!

Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.

I hide my distress, just like the blessed birds hide themselves when they are preparing to die. Wine! Wine, roses, music and your indifference to my sadness, my loved-one!

Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss’d Of the Two Worlds so wisely – they are thrust Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn Are scattered, and their mouths are stopped with Dust.

A drink is shorter than a tale.

The Revelations of Devout and Learn’d Who rose before us, and as Prophets burn’d, Are all but Stories, which, awoke from Sleep They told their comrades, and to Sleep return’d.

Yes, the first morning of creation wrote what the last dawn of reckoning shall read.

I have not asked for life. But I try to accept whatever life brings without surprise. And I shall depart again without having questioned anyone about my strange stay here on earth.

And this I know; whether the one True Light Kindle to Love, or Wrath consume me quite, One flash of it within the Tavern caught Better than in the temple lost outright.

Ah Love! could you and I with him conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire Would we not shatter it to bits-and then Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire?

By Fate full many a heart has been undone, And many a sprightly rose made woe-begone; Plume thee not on thy lusty youth and strength: Full many a bud is blasted ere its bloom.

Fools, your reward is neither here nor there.

Alcohol tells truth, but its truth is not normal.

Wine is the first weapon that devils use in attacking the young.

Note to self: no matter how bad life gets, there’s always beer.

An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke – although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness.

We got more provisions for our whiskey than the same money, which we paid for the liquor, would have bought; so after all it proved a very profitable investment.

As adults we try to relax from the never-ending quest for reason and order by drinking a little whiskey or smoking whatever works for us, but the wisdom isn’t in the whiskey or the smoke. The wisdom is in the moments when the madness slips away and we remember the basics.

As adults we try to relax from the never-ending quest for reason and order by drinking a little whiskey or smoking whatever works for us, but the wisdom isn’t in the whiskey or the smoke. The wisdom is in the moments when the madness slips away and we remember the basics.

I was thinking that women should put pictures of missing husbands on beer cans.