The Bartender's Cure Quotes

“But nothing had changed. That's what he didn't understand. All the bad things in me had always been there, it's just that they were only now coming to the surface. And somehow he was surprised. When he said You never used to be like that, what he meant was, I was under the impression that you were fun and bright and quirky but I did not understand that those traits might have other sides, might have shadows that loom from time to time. When he asked What changed, what he meant was, I am only just realizing that you are a full human being and not a Zooey Deschanel character come to life. What he meant was, This is not the girl I signed up for.”
― Wesley Straton, The Bartender's Cure

“But I don't know. What do I want? It has always felt like a stupid question. Irrelevant. Because my own goals have been set from birth, unchangeable as my blood type: a good education, a good job, a nice suburban house, a nice suburban family. I thought, when I was younger, that is what everybody wanted. I am only now having these assumptions shaken.”
― Wesley Straton, The Bartender's Cure

“When I was growing up, I was afraid of sex, because everyone loves to tell young girls how much of themselves, they will be giving up in the act. But that isn't always true. Sometimes sex is the opposite of intimacy.”
― Wesley Straton, The Bartender's Cure

“And the nervous girl would watch with envy, an outsider always, wishing she could wring herself out so easily. Of course, she learned.”
― Wesley Straton, The Bartender's Cure

“How do any of us end up working in bars? Some become bartenders on purpose- Han, Fina, Scott the Scot. But more often we stumble into it, in moments like these. Because our shiny degrees have not delivered the futures we were promised. Because we are night owls in a world that prizes early birds. Because we are tired of staring at screens, of sitting in unending meetings, of working for companies that do and make nothing. Because something marked us in our lives, or we marked ourselves, as somehow unfit for the office, for the classroom, for the nine-to-five. Because we descended, and found that once we had drunk the nectar of this particular netherworld, we could never go home.”
― Wesley Straton, The Bartender's Cure

“At a good show I could really let go of everything and let joy it. It took me out of myself. Or no, perhaps that’s not right. Perhaps it was the only time I was really fully alive.”
― Wesley Straton, The Bartender's Cure

“Isn't that what a bar is for? To be a safe space for the lonely and the unhappy, for those who don't want to go home to their empty houses of their chirping smoke alarms of their disinterested boyfriends of themselves, worst of all themselves?”
― Wesley Straton, The Bartender's Cure

“Because it is easy to get derailed when you start thinking about how you must always and forever foreswear your bad habits and your bad thoughts, but if you just think, today I won't, that feels attainable.”
― Wesley Straton, The Bartender's Cure

“What I learn is: bartending and storytelling are inextricably linked, and I love the stories. I love the breathless enthusiasm of these writers, I love their love. I devour the books one after the other, hungry as always, and still unsated after.”
― Wesley Straton, The Bartender's Cure

“Haley sounds genuinely angry, which shouldn't make me happy, but it does. If the apartment were on fire and she could save only one of us, I have to believe it would be me. I can't tell you why this is so important, but it is.”
― Wesley Straton, The Bartender's Cure

“Because we descended, and found that once we had drunk the nectar of this particular netherworld, we could never go home.”
― Wesley Straton, The Bartender's Cure

“It’s the sort of wide-eyed enthusiasm that we ruthlessly mock in teenage girls, but apparently encourage in good-looking white men in their early twenties.”
― Wesley Straton, The Bartender's Cure