Joanne Harris Quotes

The sluices of the grog-shop are fed from the wine-glasses in the parlor, and there is a lineal descent from the gentleman who hiccoughs at his elegant dinner-table to the sot who makes a bed of the gutter.

Drunkenness is the vice of a good constitution or of a bad memory of a constitution so treacherously good that it never bends till it breaks; or of a memory that recollects the pleasures of getting intoxicated, but forgets the pains of getting sober.

Wine in excess keeps neither secrets nor promises.

Drown in a cold vat of whiskey? Death, where is thy sting?

You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.

Of all vices take heed of drunkenness; other vices are but fruits of disordered affections--this disorders, nay, banishes reason; other vices but impair the soul--this demolishes her two chief faculties, the understanding and the will; other vices make their own way--this makes way for all vices; he that is a drunkard is qualified for all vice.

All excess is ill; but drunkenness is of the worst sort. It spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous, and mad.

Nor is drunkenness censured for anything so much as its intemperate and endless talk.

I had been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who got drunk - and I would have liked to have the boozing scholars of the Universities wheeled into line and properly chastised for their squalid misuse of what I must ever regard as a gift of the gods.

O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou has no name to be known by, let us call thee devil....O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!

One that hath wine as a chain about his wits, such a one lives no life at all.

He's so full of alcohol, if you put a lighted wick in his mouth he'd burn for three days.

The drunkard is convicted by his praises of wine.

Lo! the poor toper whose untutored sense, Sees bliss in ale, and can with wine dispense; Whose head proud fancy never taught to steer, Beyond the muddy ecstasies of beer.

The first draught serveth for health, the second for pleasure, the third for shame, and the fourth for madness.

Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with that it's compounding a felony.

Drinking habits were very prevalent among men, and were not in any way disgraceful, unless excessive.

Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.

A man can take a little bourbon without getting drunk, but if you hold his mouth open and pour in a quart, he's going to get sick on it.

Bacchus hath drowned more men than Neptune.

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.

It is widely held that too much wine will dull a man's desire. Indeed it will in a dull man.

It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or the fourteenth.

Hide our ignorance as we will, an evening of wine soon reveals it.

He is a drunkard who takes more than three glasses though he be not drunk.