Quotes from Susan Cheever

An illegal landing in a hostile place, partially caused because of a shortage of beer, was not an auspicious beginning.

Hooker was falsely thought to be the origin of the word for "prostitute," because his camp was so rowdy.

With her bad luck, scruffy passengers and drunken sailing, the Mayflower is still our glorious origin myth.

John Barleycorn's final words: "I've had more friends in private and more foes in public than any other man in America.

General Grant is a great general," he said. "I know him well. He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk; and now, sir, we stand by each other always.

South Carolina senator James Chestnut facetiously promised to drink all the blood that was shed, since he thought the war woudn't amount to anything serious. "Southern secessionists believed northerners would never mobilize to halt national division or that they would mount nothing more than brief and ineffective resistance," writes Drew Gilpin Faust in her book on the Civil War, This Republic of Suffering.

Although they sometimes claim objectivity, historians are the most subjective of all writers. Hidden behind the thousands of facts unearthed by research, they safely arrange the world to reflect their own vision.

In 1820, the average amount an individual drank in one day was more than three times the average today.119

Love is a great wrecker of peace of mind.

Falling in love as we know it is an addictive experience.

Love is a great wrecker of peace of mind.

Psychological studies have recently shown that adversity can be a more powerful motivator than support. Successful people often remember being told that they could not do what they have, in fact, done brilliantly. Stubbornness drove them. Their parents or teachers have told them they will never make any money, or that they will never get a college degree, or that they will never marry and have children. The urge to prove authority wrong has often spurred human beings to unusual success.

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

Writers often write their best when they are feeling their worst

The Pilgrims landed the Mayflower at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on a cold November day in 1620 because they were running out of beer.

There wasn't much good to say about the voyage. Five weeks in, with no land in sight, the scanty provisions began to run out. This was a concern for passengers, and also for sailors who were traditionally promised a gallon of beer a day as part of their sailing wages. They could do without food; they could not do without drink.

On the voyage from England, beer was their everything. Beer was their fruit and their vegetables in a diet that otherwise consisted of bread, cheese, and meat. Beer was their yogurt with its healing enzymes, and beer was their medicinal spirit. Beer was their water, and beer was their, well, beer.

Desperate for beer, they ignored the abundant freshwater. Even the Bible advised against drinking water in Saint Paul's epistle to Timothy: "Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and for thine own infirmities."27

At times, we don't seem to be able to moderate are drinking. At other times we blame it for everything. We love it or we hate it. It is our big solution and it is our big problem.

Twenty-first-century American writers do not drink much.

Drinking, as Eric Burns writes, was our first national pastime—long before baseball was invented.

Seven thousand arrests for alcohol possession in New York City between 1921 and 1923 (when enforcement was more or less openly abandoned) resulted in only seventeen convictions.

The Pilgrims believed beer was an unalloyed good, a 'good creature of God.' People who did not drink were suspect and 'crank-brained.

This tension between the colonists' unabashed enjoyment of drink and their contempt for drunkenness was soon expressed in a series of laws, which are still part of the split American character.