Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.
Interpretation
Alcohol leads to empty words, losing their significance once clarity returns.
This quote highlights the idea that words spoken while intoxicated lack depth and meaning, as they are often influenced by altered states of mind. Just as darkness dissipates with the dawn, so too do the fleeting sentiments expressed under the influence of alcohol vanish, revealing the hollow nature of such utterances.
In practice
During a discussion about the effects of alcohol, one might refer to this quote to emphasize how intoxication can lead to meaningless conversations.
Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn't comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.
What she said was always strange. It had happened long ago. It seemed insignificant. And yet it was something you remembered forever. The words as well as the story. The voice as much as the words.
I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.
Perhaps someone will have seen mine, the one Iβm waiting for, just as I saw him, in a ditch when his hands were making their last appeal and his eyes no longer could see. Someone who will never know what that man was to me; someone whose name Iβll never know.
Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.
A prolonged silence ensues. The reason for the silence is our growing interest one for the other. No one is aware of it, no one yet; no one? am I quite sure?
Torah values are the ones that inform my life.
There is an ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world. It is the darkness from which the light shines. When you recognize the integrity of the universe and that death is as certain as birth, then you can relax and accept that this is the way it is. There is nothing else to do.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
The whole of life has become an institution, a madhouse in which duties are to be fulfilled not love; in which you have to behave, not be spontaneous; in which a pattern has to be followed, not the overflow of life and energy. That's why the mind thinks and decides everything, because there is danger.
Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.
All of us are citizens in a republic much larger than the Republic of America. It is the Republic of Letters, a realm of the mind that extends everywhere, without police, national boundaries, or disciplinary frontiers.
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