Quotes from Susan Cheever

Whenever there was a crisis, I found a man to help me take the edge off the feelings of helplessness and pain.

There were a number of books about Bill Wilson, and by him, but a lot of the basic biographical tasks had not been done.

The program of A.A., as written by Bill Wilson and Dr. Smith, only has one purpose: to get you sober. That's it. To make you a better person, forget it. That was one of the things he came to understand in those years of trial and error. It has to be about only one thing.

When women are angry at men, they call them heartless. When men are angry at women, they call them crazy. Sometimes it doesn't stop there.

Death is terrifying because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time.

Dogs are great teachers. They are at home in the world. They live in the moment, and they force us to stay there with them. Dogs love us unconditionally, not for our bodies or bank accounts.

having tried and failed to invent a better future for himself, in the end he invented a better past"178

as well as 10,000 traffic fatalities a year caused by drinking.

Benjamin Franklin's Drinker's Dictionary, some synonyms for drunk can be:

afflicted, piss'd in the brook, had a thump over the head with Sampson's jawbone

The War of Independence was not a heroic enterprise but the result of a political miscalculation.

McCarthy's drinking and his arrogance were finally his downfall—he flew too close to the sun. As chairman of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he went after the State Department and the Voice of America. His tactics were always the same—bluster replaced reason.

cherry merry, hammerish, haunted with evil spirits, moon-ey'd, nimptopsical, and double-tongu'd.

At lunch he invariably downed a bottle of champagne, or brandy if he was in a different mood, and by afternoon he was almost invariably drunk.

corn sweetener is to the republic of fat what corn whiskey was to the alcoholic republic.

We used to be the drunkest nation in the world; now we are the fattest nation in the world.

All five of our twentieth-century literature Nobel laureates were alcoholics—Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck.

the aristocrats came over a decade later on the Arbella. The trash came on the Mayflower.

The first temperance groups were secular and calm. Their purpose was to help men hang on to their paychecks and their dignity. But America is not a calm nation.

American poet who wrote: "If Barley be wanting to make into malt

We must be content and think it no fault; /

For we can make liquor to sweeten our lips /

Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut tree chips.

To the farmers the new tax was an example of another oppressor telling them what to do and then charging them for it.