Drinking blurred my edges and made me feel physically part of the world, entwined with everything around me: his body, the salt air, the rush and hiss of the water. This was the opposite of what I’d felt most of my life, that fervent desire to disappear from whatever moment I’d found myself inhabiting, so that I could fast-forward to another moment in the future, once my real life had begun.

—Leslie Jamison, Running and Drinking Were The Two Quickest Ways to Escape

“Sobriety is an absence that makes room for so much plenitude.”

—Leslie Jamison

Reading the novel illuminated my own deep ambivalence about booze: how much relief I felt at stopping, how thirsty I still felt.

—Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

A writer’s journey has never been easy, but some roads, it seems, are more treacherous than others. These days, you’re more likely to hear about nurturing self-care practices to support creativity—like yoga or meditation—than a writer’s favorite cocktail (unless, of course, it’s made with kale juice). Are writer’s drinking less? It’s hard to say. Perhaps they’re just using different libations to arrive at the same destination. After all, Charles Baudelaire didn’t think your spirit of choice mattered. “One should always be drunk,” he wrote. “But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk.”

—E.B. White

“A household slave runs away from the master that beats him.  But you remain with the wine that beats your head each day.”

—St. Basil the Great, On Fasting and Feasts: St. Basil the Great, Homily Against Drunkards

For wine leads to more wine.  It does not satisfy a need, but produces an inexorable need for another drink, making those who are drunk thirsty and arousing in them an even-greater appetite for more.  But even though they imagine that they have an insatiable desire for drink, they experience or rather deliberately choose something quite the opposite of this.  For by continual self-indulgence they dull their senses.  Just as too much light blinds the eyes, and those buffeted by loud noises are made completely deaf by the excessive beating that their ears suffer, so too drunkards fail to notice that they destroy whatever pleasure they experience by their excessive love of pleasure.  They find the wine tasteless and watery even if it is undiluted.  And when in its place they drink fresh wine, they find it warm, even if it is completely unmixed, even if it is ice-cold, and it cannot quench that internal fire that burns within them from an excessive amount of wine.

—St. Basil the Great, On Fasting and Feasts: St. Basil the Great, Homily Against Drunkards

Drunkards are more pitiable than those sailing on dangerous waters insofar as the latter blame winds, the sea, and external forces, but the former willingly choose to enter the storm of drunkenness.  Whoever is possessed by a demon is pitiable, but whoever is drunk, even though he suffers the same things, does not deserve our pity because he wrestles with a demon of his own choosing.

—St. Basil the Great, On Fasting and Feasts: St. Basil the Great, Homily Against Drunkards

“A thankful person does not need tranquilizers – his peaceful heart is a substitute for these – but the unthankful is always troubled, and this in turn keeps him away from giving thanks.”

—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Life of Thanksgiving