A Drinking Life Quotes

“I would understand later that baseball was what truly made him an American: the sports pages were more crucial documents than the Constitution.”
― Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life

“The world was a grand confusion. Finally, when I was drunk, and my mind couldn’t do what I wanted it to do, I went home. I would lie alone In the dark, feeling that I was a character in a story that had lost its plot.”
Sann “Don’t ever use the word tragedy again. You tell what happened, and let the reader say it’s a tragedy. If you’re crying, the reader won’t.”
― Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life

“I wanted to sit there forever, drinking in bitter satisfaction, using someone else as a license. In the years that followed, I did a lot of that.”
― Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life

“Maybe words, like potions, were also capable of magic.”
― Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life

“That was it. To be a rolling stone. In the romantic places of the earth. Ready for a fight, a frolic, or a feed. And since I was Irish, since I was Billy Hamill's son, since I was from Brooklyn: a drink too.”
― Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life

“For a long time, I was in love with her in that diffuse, ambiguous, and obsessive way that can never be explained to strangers.”
― Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life

“I will live my life from now on, I will not perform it.”
― Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life: A Memoir

“It wasn’t that I was a fan of Stalin; I didn’t like his eyes, which were beady and shifty in the news photographs; and his hands looked too small for his body. More important, I knew that there were no freedoms in the Soviet Union (or Russia, as we all called it), and I was sure that if I lived there I’d have to be against the government, and that meant I’d end up in Siberia. But I thought there was something amazingly stupid about the Cold War; Stalin was now the devil incarnate, only four years after he had served on the side of the angels, namely us. Either we’d made a mistake during the war, or we were making a mistake now. And there was a larger problem, of which Stalin was part: Why were so many Americans so scared, all the time? We were the strongest country in the world. We won the war. We had the atom bomb. In May, Truman finally broke the Russian blockade of Berlin with a giant airlift. So why were these people shitting in their pants when they thought about communists? The communists won in China, but that didn’t mean they were about to land in Los Angeles. And why did so many people think that the communists might be behind anything that made sense: unions, health care, free education? Even in 1949, there were people saying that we shouldn’t have stopped in Berlin in 1945, we should’ve kept going all the way to Moscow. George Patton, he knew how to deal wit’ dese bastids. Oney thing they respect is force.”
― Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life: A Memoir

“I thought I was American, but in those days in Brooklyn, when you were asked what you were, you answered with a nationality other than your own. Since my parents were from Ireland, I was from a group called “Irish.”
― Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life: A Memoir

“I urged myself to live in a state of complete consciousness, even when that meant pain or boredom." - Pete Hamill.”
― Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life

“Love gets everything all screwed up. It's one of those lies that ruin the world.”
― Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life