The Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe
“The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple… If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.”
“There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you’d really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short.” ~Terry Pratchett, Mort
toasted the hangover
inevitable as sun
that used to rise
in your name
i toasted the carnivals
we never went to
and the things you never won
for me
the ferris wheels we never
kissed on and all the dreams
between us
that sat there
like balloons on a carney’s board
waiting to explode with passion
but slowly deflated
hung slave
under the pin-
prick of a tack
hung
heads down
like lovers
when it doesn’t
work, like me
at last call
after too many cheap
too many sweet
too much
whisky makes me
sick, like the smell of cheap,
like the smell of
the dead
― Daphne Gottlieb, Final Girl
susan ertz
“How do I feel today? I feel as unfit as an unfiddle,
And it is the result of a certain turbulence in the mind and an uncertain burbulence in the middle.
What was it, anyway, that angry thing that flew at me?
I am unused to banshees crying Boo at me.
Your wife can’t be a banshee—
Or can she?”
― Ogden Nash, Private Dining-room and Other New Verses
KINGSLEY AMIS
“In his dream, George Stetchkin was in the dock at the Central Criminal Court, accused of the murder of nine million innocent brain cells. The usher was showing the jury the alleged murder weapon, an empty Bison Brand vodka bottle. Then the judge glared at him over the rims of his spectacles and sentenced him to the worst hangover of his life.”
― Tom Holt, Blonde Bombshell
Quotes and Sayings
“He realised at once that a mistake had been made: he had been sent the wrong hangover. Somewhere in northern Rhodesia there was a bull elephant who had got drunk on fermented marula fruit, rampaged through a nearby village, and fallen asleep in a ditch, and was now pleasantly surprised to find itself greeting the day with only the mild headache that follows a couple of bottles of good red wine… Perhaps if he got in touch with the relevant authorities he could get this unfortunate little mix-up corrected, but he would have to do so without moving his head or opening his eyes. Otherwise he would die from the pain.”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident
Hidekaz Himaruya
“She meant I was hungover. I had been slaughtered, legless, trolleyed, slashed, shredded, plastered, polluted, pissed. I thought, I do love my country’s relationship with alcohol. How would I ever exist in the United States? I suppose I would have grief counselling instead. ”
― Peter Carey, The Chemistry of Tears
-30.428397
153.017921
― P.G. Wodehouse
“This is that moment in the hangover in which you discover that your keys are in your hat, the cat is in the sink, and you attempted late the previous night to make stew out of a pot holder. Things are in the wrong place. Religion is in the box where science used to be. Politics is on the shelf where you thought you left science the previous afternoon. Entertainment seems to have been knocked over and spilled on
everything.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
-30.428397
153.017921
― Randy Wayne White, Ten Thousand Islands
“Oh man sometimes I wake up feel like a cat run over.
Are you familiar with the stoical aspects of hard drinking, of heavy drinking? Oh it’s heavy. Oh it’s hard. It isn’t easy. Jesus, I never meant me any harm. All I wanted was a good time.”
― Martin Amis, Money
the old proverbial recovery through ancient eyes
THE OLD PROVERBIAL RECOVERY 