Bar Room Quotes & Sayings

Love changes us, Son." Ray rose to his feet, crossing the room slowly to set his empty glass on the bar. "Don't make the same mistake I did, Rowdy. Once it's over that first time, once you've let another man claim what's yours and yours alone, you lose a part of your soul. Getting it back is hell. A hell I hope you never know. — Lora Leigh

The comment quieted the room, like a sudden shout of "Who wants extra bacon?" at a bar mitzvah. — Brandon Sanderson

It was the scale, the extremity of things here that made an impression on her: the two beds in their double room that could comfortably sleep three people each; the throaty clunking of the machine down the corridor that ejected fat glinting ice cubes, tumbling like coins from a jackpotting fruit machine; the toothache temperature of the Cokes from the mini bar (she had never known drinks to be so cold); the improbable proportions of the cars on the freeway; the sleek gleefulness of the morning TV presenters with drawls so sassy they sounded put on; the enormity of the breakfasts and the people who ate them. America seemed souped-up to JoAnne, as though it had to be bigger, better, colder, hotter, cheerier, louder, just all-round "er" than everywhere else. — Tina Seskis

I use the term bar-room to represent every means for the sale and traffic in liquor, and I earnestly appeal to the people to put an end to the traffic, no matter under what name or guise it may be carried on. — Thomas Jordan Jarvis

The bus was crowded, standing room only, and he clung apelike from a bar that hung down from the ceiling. It was humiliating to be packed in with all these people; it reminded him of a cattle car or worse, a sardine can, or worse...but what could be worse than this? — Joseph G. Peterson

Back at home, after some prodding from Tereza, he admitted that he had been jealous watching her dance with a colleague of his. "You mean you were really jealous?" she asked him ten times or more, incredulously, as though someone had just informed her she had been awarded a Nobel Peace prize. Then she put her arm around his waist and began dancing across the room. The step she used was not the one she had shown off in the bar. It was more like a village polka, a wild romp that sent her legs flying in the air and her torso bounding all over the room, with Tomas in tow. Before long, unfortunately, she bagan to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealously not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his death. — Milan Kundera

I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither. — Henry David Thoreau

My question was:How did I go from merely seeing the dirty French Santa in a bar to being in his hotel room the next morning? And this presented me with an actual equation. How did one plus one equal old French Santa? — Augusten Burroughs

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only 'station' and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city. — Italo Calvino

Thank you for all your guidance and wisdom, for setting the bar so much higher than I thought I could reach, and for giving me plenty of room to run with my own ideas. You've been the best teacher I've ever had. — Lisa Genova

Colter searched for original Mexican tiles to use as patterns for copies, and during the search, a barrel of old tile letters was found in a cellar corner. She decided to use the letters on the walls of the Cocina Cantina to spell out old Spanish proverbs about eating and drinking. Above the bar was "A vuestra salud" [to your health], and in another room, "Not with whom you were born, but with whom you pasture. — Virginia L. Grattan

First thing you do, room, bar, restaurant, town or crib, is check and memorize the ways out. — James Sallis

A Glimpse
A glimpse through an interstice caught,
Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark'd seated in a corner,
Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,
A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest,
There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word. — Walt Whitman

Travelling men make wide detours just to be in the same room as her. That's the most that even the best of of them can hope for.
Molly Pratt, he says. Remind me, what's a heavenly creature like you doin in a dump like this?
Servin rotgut to scoundrels like you, she says. An if you call my place a dump again, I'll bar you. — Moira Young

The door opened a crack, and then Lassiter, in his game gear, stepped inside the room. As he held something out, Mary couldn't see what it was - Wait a minute, was that a Snickers bar? "What are you doing?" she blurted as he cautiously approached. The beast snapped to attention, its jowls curling up in a snarl at the angel. But Lassiter was undaunted - so not a shocker. "Here," he said. "Have a Snickers. You're not yourself when you're hangry." There was a heartbeat of a pause. And then she couldn't help it. She had to start laughing. "Really. Really? — J.R. Ward

The Bar Room has a corner table placed strategically at a point diagonally across from the entrance. the table of tables in the setting of settings in the building of buildings. In the religion of lunch, this is the holy of holies. — Raymond Sokolov

I took half a bottle of wine and entire bar of dark chocolate up to my room and proceeded to self-medicate the hell out of myself. Don't scoff until you've tried it. — Virginia Brown

I will be thirty years old again in thirty seconds. I will take the best room in the Grand Central or the Orndorff Hotel. I will dine on oysters and palomitas and wash them down with white wine. Then I will go to the Acme or Keating's or the Big Gold Bar and sit down and draw my cards and fill an inside straight and win myself a thousand dollars. Then I will go to the Red Light or the Monte Carlo and dance the floor afire. Then I will go to a parlor house and have them top up a bathtub with French champagne and I will strip and dive into it with a bare-assed blonde and a redhead and an octoroon and the four of us will get completely presoginated and laugh and let long bubbly farts at hell and baptize each other in the name of the Trick, the Prick, and the Piper-Heidsick. — Glendon Swarthout

V? Answer the question or so help me God I'll beat it out of you."
"I just know how to find him."
"What are you hiding?"
V went over to the bar, poured himself a couple of fingers of Grey
Goose, and hammered the shot. He swallowed a number of times and then
let the words fly.
"I fed him."
A chorus of inhales floated a ... round the room. As Wrath rose in disbelief, V poured himself another hit of Goose.
"You did what?" The last word was bellowed.
"I had him drink some of me."
"Vishous ... " Wrath stalked around the desk, shitkickers hitting the
floor like boulders. The king got face-to-face close. "He's a male.
He's human. What the fuck were you thinking?"
More vodka. Definitely time for more Goose. — J.R. Ward

In fact, I noticed everything about Alex. Like that his left nostril was slightly larger than his right nostril. And the way he ate a Kit Kat bar: chocolate first and then the layers of wafer separately. I could pick his one sneeze in a room full of sneezers. — Autumn Doughton

Maybe it hadn't entered my head at all. Maybe it had just brushed past me, like someone easing by in a dark room, the face lost in shadow, my thoughts lost in another conversation, though something in her movement or perfume is disturbingly familiar, though how familiar is impossible to tell because by the time I realize she's someone I should know she's already gone, deep into the din, beyond the bar, taking with her any chance of recognition. Though she hasn't left. She's still there. Embracing shadows. — Mark Z. Danielewski

If you were ready to sleep with me we wouldn't be in this bar, but in my room not wasting any more time. — Stephanie Witter

When Jack walked in he took a calculated seat at the bar, it didn't take long for a chill to set into the room. — Kenneth Eade

Pong had mutated into large stand-up Sega consoles by '82 and here was some extra revenue the guys were well up for. So the space on the left of the entrance was to be the games room. Until two weeks to opening.
"Where's the cloakroom?"
"The what?"
"The cloakroom, the fucking cloakroom."
"What's your problem?"
"We don't have a cloakroom. We have special polished South African granite bar tops that we haven't told Erasmus about 'cause he has a thing about apartheid, we have a balcony balustrade made of shaped QE-fucking-2 mahogany, but we seem to have built an entire club without a cloakroom."
"Fuck."
Hence you did not pass the games room but the cloakroom, the only cloakroom in the Manchester with forty-two power points. if you ever wanted to do a bit of ironing, these people were there for you. — Tony Wilson

Without electricity or gas, the kitchen became a twilight mausoleum of dead appliances. One day, Natasha had an idea. Wearing latex gloves she found in Sonja's room, she scrubbed the innards of the oven and refrigerator with steel wool and bleach. She cut a broomstick to the width of the refrigerator compartment, jammed it in below the thermostat control, and pulled out the plastic shelves. In her bedroom, she gathered clothes from the floor in sweeping armfuls and deposited them before the refrigerator and the oven. Ever since she had begun working for the shuttle trader, her wardrobe exceeded her closet space. She hung silk evening dresses and cashmere sweaters on the broomstick bar, set folded jeans and blouses on the oven rack. When finished, she opened the doors to her new closet and bureau and felt pleased with her ingenuity. This is how you will survive, she told herself. You will turn the holes in your life into storage space. — Anthony Marra

There is a big difference between wishing you was doing something and the actual getting it done. And this wasn't no back room in a bar or glory hole where I didn't even have to look at who I was with. This was Kabe. — James Buchanan

Eventually, the room was cleared, and we stood there together, chests heaving, a spray of shifters and humans on the floor in front of us. We weren't entirely undamaged - I'd taken a bruising shot to my right thigh, and Ethan had slices across his belly where he'd been caught with the edge of a bar of steel broken from someone's office chair.
But we were alive.
We glanced over at each other. I was just about to speak, but before I could get out words, his hand was at the back of my head, his mouth pressing against mine. The intensely possessive kiss left me gasping for breath, but even as he pulled back, his fingers stayed knotted in the back of my hair. — Chloe Neill

He was sitting in the back of the booth, and Lila on the outside edge, as far from him as possible. She couldn't shake the feeling he was watching her beneath that brimmed cap, even though every time she checked, his attention was leveled on the tavern behind her head. His fingers traced absent pattern in a pool of spilled ale, but his green eye twitched in concentration. It took her several long seconds to realize he was counting bodies in the room.

"Nineteen," she said coolly, and Alucard and Kell both looked at her as if she'd spoken out of turn, but Holland simply answered, "Twenty," and despite herself, Lila swiveled in her seat. She did a swift count. He was right. She'd missed on e of the men behind the bar. Dammit.

"If you have to use your eyes," he added, "you're doing it wrong. — V.E Schwab

The school-room sends men to the Legislature, to the bench, and the executive office. The bar-room sends them to the scaffold and hell. — Thomas Jordan Jarvis

That room was not available, and the only other room had been booked for a Jewish bar mitzvah. I called the father and told him I needed the room and I would pay him to move the bar mitzvah to an adjoining room which was smaller. — Lew Wasserman

eyeing his blue overalls. A game of darts which was going on at the other end of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as much as thirty seconds. The old man whom he had followed was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young man with enormous forearms. A knot of others, standing round with glasses in their hands, were watching the scene. 'I arst you civil — George Orwell

It wasn't even a bar. It was just a room where people drank while they waited for other people with whom they had business. The business usually involved the transfer of ownership of something from one person to another, but then, what business doesn't? — Terry Pratchett

There is an eternal conflict between the school-room and the bar-room. The school-room makes men, the bar-room destroys them. — Thomas Jordan Jarvis

Lola's was not exactly a bar. It was a small beer-and-soda joint. There was a Coca-Cola box full of beer and soda and ice at the left of the door as you came in. A counter with tube-metal stools covered in yellow glazed leather ran down one side of the room as far as the jukebox. Tables were lined along the wall opposite the counter. The stools had long since lost the rubber caps for the legs and made horrible screeching noises when the maid pushed them around to sweep. There was a kitchen in back, where a slovenly cook fried everything in rancid fat. There was neither past nor future in Lola's. The place was a waiting room, where certain people checked in at certain times. — William S. Burroughs

Then I got a gig with an older friend who had the equipment and he played in this bar. They would bring me in the bar through the backdoor and I would DJ in the back room most of the night. Then they'd take me out the backdoor, so I was never really in the bar. — Jam Master Jay

The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose; the snow had piled itself against his shoulders and chest, and added a white crest to the burden he carried. He staggered into the Coarch and Horses, more dead than alive as it seemed, and flung his portmanteau down. "A fire," he cried, "in the name of human charity! A room and a fire!" He stamped and shook the snow from off himself in the bar, and followed Mrs. Hall into her guest parlour to strike his bargain. And with that much introduction, that and a ready acquiescence to terms and a couple of sovereigns flung upon the table, he took up his quarters in the inn. — H.G.Wells

Ernie greets us again and slaps some glasses on the bar. A young-looking guy in the back of the room mutters something about "damn Cullenist" loud enough for me to hear. (Well, me and everybody else, since we've all got superhearing.) What's he talking about? What did I
oh wait, yeah, those vampire books with the sparkly vampires. Great. — Kimberly Pauley

I've attended some pretty glamorous events over the years, like the Costume Ball at the Met, the Golden Globes, and the Vanity Fair Oscar party. They are usually held at distinguished cultural institutions like the Met or the Annenberg Center - always beautiful spaces that are home to priceless works of art. The first thing they do when a Hollywood party rents out the place is push all the art to the corner so it doesn't get in the way. They have to do that so there's room for a red carpet, a bar, a prime rib carving station, a photo booth, and, for some reason, an Acura parked inside, in the middle of the party floor. There's always a parked Acura at every major Hollywood party. Who — Mindy Kaling

I've been focusing on my career. I've had no time. That's why I wanted to go out this weekend. I've been storing that shit up like a sexual camel. At this point I'd probably just walk into the bar, blow my load all over the room like a fire hose, and walk out. — Darien Cox

Life was so much simpler in pre-video days when everyone refused invitations because the 'Forsyte Saga' was on. Now we all just have a long list of unwatched shows, all of which, it seems, our friends are raving about. I feel as outdated as if I wore a Fair Isle sweater, ate Pot Noodle and had a two-bar electric fire in the sitting room. — Simon Hoggart

Tobin," Mom said disapprovingly. She wasn't a particularly funny person. It suited her professionally - I mean, you don't want your cancer surgeon to walk into the examination room and be like, "Guy walks into a bar. Bartender says, 'What'll ya have?' And the guy says, 'Whaddya got?' And the bartender says, 'I don't know what I got, but I know what you got: Stage IV melanoma. — John Green

They were the kind of parents that hid any bad shit. They didn't yell at each other in front of us. They didn't even shout at each other in their room when we were in bed, or at least if they did, we didn't hear it. He was, Dad was, fuck, I was a little kid and I knew he was into her. Always kissin' her, her mouth, cheek, neck, shoulder. Touchin' her ass, her waist. They walked, he had his hand on her back or his arm around her or he held her hand. She walked through the livin' room, he'd grab her and pull her into his lap. They laughed a lot. Gave each other looks a lot. We'd go to bed, they weren't camped in front of the TV, but sittin' at the bar in the kitchen, sittin' close, talkin'. Not about heavy shit, air wasn't like that around them. Not ever, that I can remember. They just got off on talkin' to each other. It was fuckin' cool. I loved that shit. Made the house feel safe. — Kristen Ashley

One night I dreamed of an angel: I walked into a huge, empty bar and saw him sitting in a corner with his elbows on the table and a cup of milky coffee in front of him. She's the love of your life, he said, looking up at me, and the force of his gaze, the fire in his eyes, threw me right across the room. I started shouting, Waiter, waiter, then opened my eyes and escaped from that miserable dream. Other nights I didn't dream of anyone, but I woke up in tears. — Roberto Bolano

Sonya lays sound asleep, breathing deeply.
I brush a wisp of hair out of her face.
She's twitching, gently snoring, and she smells of cigarette smoke from the bar and something else - cool ranch and toothpaste, I think. Regardless, she is more beautiful than ever.
I sit next to her and speak in a whisper. "You know I will always love you. Of all the people I've met in my life, you are the most exceptional, the most caring, and the most deserving of happiness. I wish I could offer you more, but the best I can do is leave you alone. If you can just stay out of this place, stay away from this town and all the things that have happened here, I know you'll find what you're looking for."
I try to resist but I can't help myself. I gently kiss her on the lips before going to sleep in the other room. — Matthew Alan

I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces. — Jonathan Safran Foer

We're bar room buddies and we're the best kind, nobody messes with that friend of mine. Chug-a-lug-a-lug-a-lugga, bar room buddy of mine. — Merle Haggard

Shit, I forgot. This time of the afternoon the bar's probably shut. Half the staff has gone sick again. Mono, I think. Well, let's go look anyway; we might be lucky. We can't go up to my room
it's full of bugs.'
Which kind?'
Both. — John Brunner

My mother is European and expresses her love through food and cuddling. She wasn't the type of mother who would make it to school plays or soccer games, but if you wanted to stay at home sick, she was your girl. Whenever you'd go up to her room to cuddle with her, she'd pull out a Kit Kat or Snickers bar from her night table and look at you with dancing eyes. — Chelsea Handler

~Posters with torn edges hanging from rotten walls~

The doctor told me something once
she said
STOP DRINKING
I slapped her across the face with this
NO
I walked right out of that office
went right down to the hole
I told the bartender
WHISKEY, MOTHERFUCKER
he poured and he poured
and I slapped my money down on that bar
the man I had been driving around with
he just sort of sat there next to this hooker
she probably had something rotten
way down there between her legs
her eyes told of no soul
I emptied the bottle down my throat
and ordered some chips
the bartender told me
THEY'RE STALE
and I give him a
I DON'T FUCKIN' CARE,
GIVE ME SOMETHIN'
He slid me a ham sandwich dripping with cheap low-fat mayo and said
ENJOY
I went back to my room
and talked all night
so much conversation
it turned the toilet bowl pale — Dave Matthes

I take back everything I ever said about that boy being clever." He turned around to face the bar while leveling an accusatory finger at the closed door. "That," he said firmly to the room in general, "is what comes of working with iron every day. — Patrick Rothfuss

At Naval Air Station Grosse Ile in Michigan, he and Barbara took a room in town for fourteen dollars a week, but without kitchen privileges. "It is sort of a lonely existence for poor Bar," Bush wrote home to Greenwich, "but she doesn't complain at all, and I am just in heaven having her here. — Jon Meacham

It's a group of men - Conor included - everyone is so collaborative and cooperative, kind, considerate, very professional. And they know their craft. They know it very very well. There's no room for messing around. It's not messy at all. When I go in at this level, when I get the opportunity to play and work at this level, it's at the top of the game. I think, in life, we rise to whatever the bar is. I've been fortunate to rise with them. — Sean Mahon

The subject of one experiment is a rat that receives mild electric shocks (roughly equivalent to the static shock you might get from scuffing your foot on a carpet). Over a series of these, the rat develops a prolonged stress-response: its heart rate and glucocorticoid secretion rate go up, for example. For convenience, we can express the long-term consequences by how likely the rat is to get an ulcer, and in this situation, the probability soars. In the next room, a different rat gets the same series of shocks - identical pattern and intensity; its allostatic balance is challenged to exactly the same extent. But this time, whenever the rat gets a shock, it can run over to a bar of wood and gnaw on it. The rat in this situation is far less likely to get an ulcer. You have given it an outlet for frustration. Other types of outlets work as well - let the stressed rat eat something, drink water, or sprint on a running wheel, and it is less likely to develop an ulcer. — Robert M. Sapolsky

We're living in a state where no one can trust his telephone conversations, nor even his personal conversations in a room, in a bar or anywhere else. — Walter Cronkite

I am grown by sympathy a little eager and sentimental, but leave me alone, and I should relish every hour and what it brought me, the pot-luck of the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Minutes after Eve stepped into her office to coordinate her next move, Peabody rushed in.
"I've got the initial sweeper's report on the room the Lombards vacated - nothing," Peabody said hurriedly. "Canvassing cops found the bar - one block east, two south of the hotel. Door was unlocked. Zana's purse was inside on the floor. I have a team heading there now."
"You've been busy," Eve said. "How did you manage to fit in sex?"
"Sex? I don't know what you're talking about. I bet you want coffee." She darted to the AutoChef, then whirled back. "How do you know I had sex? Do you have sex radar?"
"Your shirt's not buttoned right, and you've got a fresh hickey on your neck."
"Damn it." Peabody slapped a hand to the side of her neck. "How bad is it? Why don't you have a mirror in here?"
"Because, let's see, could it be because it's an office? — J.D. Robb

Are we going to get killed?"
Cam scoped out the dingy room. No doubt there was at least one shotgun behind the bar and a few armed patrons, but no one struck him as particularly dangerous. "Not likely."
She kept her palm on the table and covertly pointed to a guy in a biker jacket with a large skull smoking a blunt. "But possible?"
He shrugged. "It is Friday night. — Avery Flynn

A locked-room problem lies at the heart of my new novel, 'In The Morning I'll Be Gone,' in which an RUC detective has to find out whether a publican's daughter who fell off a table in a bar that was locked from the inside was in fact murdered. — Adrian McKinty

all just heightened the sensations of fucking the hottest man in the bar in a messy back-room encounter. Ty — Abigail Roux

He found himself one night in a bar standing beside a gorgeous woman. "Would you be willing to sleep with me for $1 million?" he asked her. She looked him over. There wasn't much to see - but still, $1 million! She agreed to go back to his room. "All right then, " he said. "Would you be willing to sleep with me for $100?" "A hundred dollars!" she shot back. "What do you think I am, a prostitute?" "We've already established that. Now we're just negotiating the price. — Steven D. Levitt

Natalie, if I was fixin' to offer a proper thank-you," he said, his Texas accent clear and present in his voice, "I'd kneel down right here and slide your jeans over your hips, down your damn-near perfect legs. I'd toss your pants across the room, followed by your panties. And then I'd lick you until the whole bar heard you come. Screaming. My. Name. — Sara Jane Stone

So he stopped at the first of them, a frigid hothouse whose front tipped forward over the street in defiance of gravity, taste, and ordinance; inside, the tender daytime flowers could be seen huddling in family groups beneath a constant, unseen sun, and behind them was the hermetic door to the dark Cactus Room where the shy nocturnal plants, genus cereus, could bloom in privacy at any hour. Vivien, once out of the car, appeared less constrained. She did not have that stiffness so many have on first entering bars, that air of waiting stubbornly for alcohol to loosen them, which so often presages their manner when it comes' time for bed. She was already excited when the martinis came. — Douglas Woolf

Ah, I understand", murmured the imperial scapegrace. Turning to the room: "When Franz Ferdinand drinks", he cried, "everybody drinks!"
Which helped restore a level of civility in the room, and soon even of cheer, as smart neckties were soaked in suds, the piano player came back from under the bar, and people in the room resumed dancing syncopated two-steps. After a while someone started singing "All Pimps Look Alike to Me", and half the room joined in. Lew, however, noticing the way the Archduke seemed to keep inching stealthily but unmistakably toward the street door, thought it wise to do the same. Sure enough, just before sliding out the door, Der F. F., with a demonic grin, screamed: "And when Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays!" whereupon he disappeared, and it was a near thing that Lew got out with his keester intact. — Thomas Pynchon

With us it ain't like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don't have to sit in no bar room blowin' in our jack jus' because we got no place else to go. If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn. But not us. — John Steinbeck

The effervescence of the previous months was losing its splendor, like the faded letters of the posters that, in these same bars, written by the same men, still recalled the Great Plans: DANCE IS THE BROTHEL'S WAITING ROOM; THE TAVERN WEAKENS CHARACTER; THE BAR DEGENERATES THE SPIRIT: LET'S CLOSE THEM! — Leonardo Padura

That's the thing. I've never met anyone like you, Tess. You think you're a no one? You're so wrong. So wrong. You stand in a room with all the Angelas, even the Ellies. None of them can compare to you. I remember when you started working at the Onslow, I couldn't keep my eyes off you. You were so terrified. You weren't full of yourself like other girls. Every time you walked into the bar, you were like a breath of fresh air. Even when Angela was a bitch to you, you rose above it. You made me see the difference in people. You're not a nobody, Tess, you're a somebody. — C.J. Duggan

We played one warm-up gig at this bar that was kinda like that bar in 'The Blues Brothers' with the chicken wire. This place called The Brick House, in Housatonic. I really can't believe we're going to play for people in New York City. I'm terrified, but it's a small enough room. But it's really just supposed to be for the fun of it. — Lauren Ambrose

He's a bar-room socialist, if that's what you mean. Beer and revolution go in, piss come out — Pat Barker

As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, 'There must be a better way of doing this'. — Margaret Atwood

Up to a few years ago nearly all the literature about Oceania was written by papalagi and other outsiders. Our islands were and still are a goldmine for romantic novelists and filmmakers, bar-room journalists and semi-literate tourists, sociologists and Ph.D. students, remittance men and sailing evangelists, UNO experts, and colonial administrators and their well-groomed spouses. Much of this literature ranges from the hilariously romantic through the pseudo-scholarly to the infuriatingly racist; from the noble savage literary school through Margaret Mead and all her comings of age, Somerset Maugham's puritan missionaries/drunks/and saintly whores and James Michener's rascals and golden people, to the stereotyped childlike pagan who needs to be steered to the Light. — Albert Wendt

Her green eyes meet mine in the Guinness mirror behind the bar and it feels like all the air has been sucked out of the room. I've never slept with this girl, but she was the first I remember wanting.
Harper Gray. — Trish Doller

Singer Cilla Black's introduction to homophobic bullying occurred during a visit from Billy, a dear childhood friend. Sharing a room with Ms Black's boyfriend, Billy Returning after having gone out by himself: collapsed by the bed and burst into floods of tears, his face bruised and splattered with blood ... " I'm Gay," Billy said, "and I've just been beaten up and robbed by a guy who picked me up in a bar and took me back to his place." — Cilla Black

that Elijah Martin--alias Skeesicks--lounging shyly into the bar-room, joined in it weakly. — Various

No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut. — Stephen Jay Gould

And that is the real elephant in the room. The monkey in my wrench. The worm in my candy bar ... — J. Kenner

The first time I go out to Nashville, ever (at this point I had only heard the rumors about what it's like) I had three writing sessions set up. The first two canceled on me. I was kind of pissed off at that point. So I just went back to my hotel room and started writing. And even though I've been to L.A. and experienced a lot of things, at the end of the day I just start to feel like I'm playing acoustically at the first bar I ever played at. — Curtis Grimes

A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. — Winston Churchill

Said. Karen inhaled deeply and blew until there was no more air in her lungs and smoke filled the room but there wasn't a single candle still burning. "Never underestimate the power of a strong woman," she said breathlessly. "Amen," Hannah murmured. Kim motioned toward the bar. "Momma's choice tonight. Mexican buffet, which comes before cake." "Not for me. I'm having a slice of that cake right now. It's my birthday and I want dessert first. Momma always let me do that on my birthday when I was a little girl," Karen said. "Yes, I did, and if you want your cake first tonight, then have at it," Hannah agreed. "Well, I'm getting into those tacos," Edith said. "Y'all have to try my watermelon salsa. I hadn't made it in years, but it turned out pretty good considering that the watermelon wasn't as good as I like it to be." "What's in it?" Sue asked. — Carolyn Brown

Which was your favorite? Living room, or bed, or floor, or bed, or wall, or mirror, or bar, or floor?"

"Shhh," I whisper, lifting my cup to take another, more careful sip of coffee. I smile into my mug. "You're weird."

"I think I need a cast for my penis. — Christina Lauren

...As the evening wore on (the supper did not end until seven in the morning), the public were admitted to watch the festivities from the balustrade, and were offered biscuits and refreshments to keep them going through the night.
...One of the lawyers was so upset by the evening that he got up to leave, proclaiming: 'They will send you to the madhouse and strike you from the list of members of the Bar.' Grimod responded by locking the doors to the apartment and preventing any further guests from leaving. Coffee and liquers were taken in an adjoining room lit by 130 candles while the guests were entertained by a magic-lantern show and some experiments with electricity performed by the Italian physicist Castanio. M Rival tells us that many of the guests fell asleep. — Giles MacDonogh

Jack," I said thoughtfully, "do you think of women as equals?"
He fitted a support bar against the frame. "Yes."
"Do you ever let a woman pay for dinner?"
"No."
"Is that why the room-service meal wasn't on my hotel bill?"
"I never let a woman pay for my food. I just said dinner was on you because I knew it was the only way you'd let me stay."
"If you think of women as equals, why didn't you let me buy you dinner?"
"Because I'm the man."

-Ella & Jack — Lisa Kleypas

I do not know who I am anymore. I though I was animal. I am no longer so sure. It's hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash. I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit too has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows when the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it. For some people that time never comes. Some stay fractured, forever broken. You see them on the street pushing carts, you see them in the faces of regulars at a bar. My cocoon was that room. — Karen Marie Moning

My father stood behind a bar in the back of the room all those years, so one day I could stand behind a podium in the front of a room. That journey, from behind that bar to behind this podium, goes to the essence of the American miracle - that we're exceptional not because we have more rich people here. We're special because dreams that are impossible anywhere else, come true here. — Marco Rubio

A soap opera character on the bar TV says, "You killed him, you smothered him with doughnuts!" Another character, another scene--she is sitting in a room with a man and an elderly woman--the leas character wonders if she's dead. The man says, No, you're alive," and the other woman hands her a plate of doughnuts.
A commercial comes on. A couple are on a date and the woman's voice-over articulates interior thoughts of what a wonderful guy her friend has set her up with: "He's so cute, and his IQ is higher than my bank balance . . . but she didn't tell me he has . . . Tourette's syndrome. — David Byrne

crossed her arms and stared back at him. "I really don't have to tell you anything." "No, you really don't." He pointed to the cops and detectives. "But those guys you do. And I'd have a better story prepared than the bullshit you just tried to feed me." Myers rose. "I need to attend to some things." "I'm sure. Calling a really good lawyer should be first on the list." She hurried from the room and disappeared down the hall to her office. On a hunch Puller went over to the bar where one of the waiters was sitting looking exhausted. He held up his set of keys and said, "Ms. Myers asked me to get something from her car, but she was so distraught she forgot to tell me what make and model." The man said, "Oh, it's the blue BMW 750. License plate says 'Grunt.' She parks it in the back lot." "Thanks. — David Baldacci

When I come back, the club is packed. There's hardly any standing room. Anna snagged a wooden bar stool, one of the few seats here. St. Clair stands close to her, facing her, and he smoothes the platinum stripe in her hair. She pulls him even closer by the top of his jeans, one finger tucked inside. It's an intimate gesture. I'm embarrassed to watch, but I can't look away.
He kisses her slowly and deeply. They don't care that anyone could watch. Or maybe they've forgotten they aren't alone. When they break apart, Anna says something that makes him fall into silly, boyish laughter. For some reason, that's the moment that makes me turn away. Something about their love is painful. — Stephanie Perkins

Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw! - Look at me! I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother's side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen! - and lay low and hold your breath, for I'm bout to turn myself loose! — Mark Twain

When there's a painting in the room, my eye goes right to it. It's like if you go into a bar and there's a television on, you can't take your eyes off the television. Paintings have that effect on me. It's where my eye settles. — Joe Bradley

He waved irritably at a waiter. There was a small bar in a dark corner of the room, where an old, wizened bartender stood for long stretches of time without moving. When called upon, he moved with contemptuous slowness. His job was that of servant to men's relaxation and pleasure, but his manner was that of an embittered quack ministering to some guilty disease. — Ayn Rand

Closing his eyes again, standing there, glass in hand, he thought for a minute with a freezing detached almost amused calm of the dreadful night inevitably awaiting him whether he drank much more or not, his room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful tumultuous sleep, interrupted by voices which were really dogs barking, or by his own name being continually repeated by imaginary parties arriving, the vicious shouting, the strumming, the slamming, the pounding, the battling with insolent archfiends, the avalanche breaking down the door, the proddings from under the bed, and always, outside, the cries, the wailing, the terrible music, the dark's spinets: he returned to the bar. — Malcolm Lowry

I worked in this bar called the Raincheck Room in the '60s; it used to be over on Santa Monica Boulevard, and, y'know, it was a pretty hip place. Lots of actors hung out there. — Alex Rocco

When I listened to her play I felt I should not be in the same room with her. There were hundreds of people but nobody left. It was a private pain. By private I mean to say unknowable. Only the music knew and it held secrets so that her playing was a puzzle, a whisper, and people afterward stood in the bar and drank and said nothing because they were complicit. There were no words. — Miriam Toews

Reservations and cloth napkins are really minor pinnacles in the high sierra of the New York lunch. The zenith, the Mount Whitney of lunches, the noon meal at which all local lines of force converge [is] the Bar Room of the Four Seasons. — Raymond Sokolov

A kind of joyous hysteria moved into the room, everything flying before the wind, vehicles outside getting dented to hell, the crowd sweaty and the smells of aftershave, manure, clothes dried on the line, your money's worth of perfume, smoke, booze; the music subdued by the shout and babble through the bass hammer could be felt through the soles of the feet, shooting up the channels of legs to the body fork, center of everything. It is the kind of Saturday night that torches your life for a few hours, makes it seem like something is happening. — Annie Proulx

It was murder - strangulation - but one need not say that the claw-mark on Mrs. Suydam's throat could not have come from her husband's or any other human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an instant in hateful red a legend which, later copied from memory, seems to have been nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of the word 'LILITH'. One need not mention these things because they vanished so quickly - as for Suydam, one could at least bar others from the room until one knew what to think oneself. The doctor has distinctly assured Malone that he did not see IT. The open porthole, just before he turned on the lights, was clouded for a second with a certain phosphorescence, and for a moment there seemed to echo in the night outside the suggestion of a faint and hellish tittering; — H.P. Lovecraft