Tavern Quotes

1. "I carried with me into the West End Bar, the White Horse Tavern, a long list of things I would never do: I would never have my hair set in a beauty parlor. I would never move to a suburb and bake cakes or make casseroles. I would never go to a country club dance, although I did like the paper lanterns casting rainbow colors on the terrace. I would never invest in the stock market. I would never play canasta. I would never wear pearls. I would love like a nursling but I would never go near a man who had a portfolio or a set of golf clubs or a business or even a business suit. I would only love a wild thing. I didn't care if wild things tended to break hearts. I didn't care if they substituted scotch for breakfast cereal. I understood that wild things wrote suicide notes to the gods and were apt to show up three hours later than promised. I understood that art was long and life was short."
Author: Anne Roiphe

2. "Double Sword Tavern." Tristan said, reading out loud. "Sounds charming and inviting."
Author: B.C. Morin

3. "But I love to drink. I can't help it. I mean, I love it Bryson-love the taste, love that buzz you get when you've had a couple, love the smell and feel of the taverns. I miss dirty jokes and the click of pool balls in the background, and that kind of bluish, under lit glow of a bar at night."
Author: Bill Bryson

4. "Charlotte slammed the paper down onto her desk with an exclamation of rage. "Aloysius Starkweather is the most stubborn, hypocritical, obstinate, degenerate-" "Would you like a thesaurus?" Will inquired."You seem to be running out of words." "And is he really degenerate?" Jem asked."I mean, the old codger's almost ninety-surely past real deviancy.""I don't know," said Will. "You'd be surprised at what some of the old fel ows over at the Devil Tavern get up to.""Nothing anyone you know might get up to would surprise us, Will," said Jessamine."Darling," said Henry anxiously, coming around the desk to where his wife was sitting, "are you quite all right? You look a bit-splotchy."He wasn't wrong. Red patches of rage had broken out over Charlotte's face and throat."I think it's charming," said Will. "I've heard polka dots are the last word in fashion this season."
Author: Cassandra Clare

5. "There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto."
Author: Cormac McCarthy

6. "I left them to it, the pointing of fingers on maps, the tracing of mountain villages, the tracks and contours on maps of larger scale, and basked for the one evening allowed to me in the casual, happy atmosphere of the taverna where we dined. I enjoyed poking my finger in a pan and choosing my own piece of lamb. I liked the chatter and the laughter from neighbouring tables. The gay intensity of talk - none of which I could understand, naturally - reminded me of left-bank Paris. A man from one table would suddenly rise to his feet and stroll over to another, discussion would follow, argument at heat perhaps swiftly dissolving into laughter. This, I thought to myself, has been happening through the centuries under this same sky, in the warm air with a bite to it, the sap drink pungent as the sap running through the veins of these Greeks, witty and cynical as Aristophanes himself, in the shadow, unmoved, inviolate, of Athene's Parthenon. ("The Chamois")"
Author: Daphne Du Maurier

7. "Ay, rail at gaming - 'tis a rich topic, and affords noble declamation. Go, preach against it in the city - you'll find a congregation in every tavern."
Author: Edward Moore

8. "They sell courage of a sort in the taverns. And another sort, though not for sale, a man can find in the confessional. Try the alehouses and the churches, Hugh. In either a man can be quiet and think."
Author: Ellis Peters

9. "Raskolnikov was not used to crowds, and, as we said before, he avoided society of every sort, more especially of late. But now all at once he felt a desire to be with other people. Something new seemed to be taking place within him, and with it he felt a sort of thirst for company. He was so weary after a whole month of concentrated wretchedness and gloomy excitement that he longed to rest, if only for a moment, in some other world, whatever it might be; and, in spite of the filthiness of the surroundings, he was glad now to stay in the tavern."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

10. "Why had he happened to hear such a discussion and such ideas at the very moment when his own brain was just conceiving … the very same ideas? And why, just at the moment when he had brought away the embryo of his idea from the old woman had he dropped at once upon a conversation about her? This coincidence always seemed strange to him. This trivial talk in a tavern had an immense influence on him in his later action; as though there had really been in it something preordained, some guiding hint…"
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

11. "For whoever is lonely there is a tavern."
Author: Georg Trakl

12. "You can take the barbarian out of the tavern, but he can take the blood out of your body."
Author: Greg X. Graves

13. "What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project."
Author: Gwendolyn Brooks

14. "Mama and Papa are more to blame (for delinquency) than the kids; parents should stay home and raise their children and spend less time in taverns."
Author: Harry S. Truman

15. "The tavern will compare favorably with the church."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

16. "I was conducted in the evening to a tavern where several of the weavers who advocate the principles of the People's Charter were in the habit of assembling."
Author: Henry Mayhew

17. "I started out mopping floors, waiting tables, and tending bar at my dad's tavern. I put myself through school working odd jobs and night shifts. I poured my heart and soul into a small business. And when I saw how out-of-touch Washington had become with the core values of this great nation, I put my name forward and ran for office."
Author: John Boehner

18. "What, man, do you mistake the hollow sky For a thronged tavern ...?"
Author: John Keats

19. "One smile on the battlefield is worth more than a dozen in the tavern"Talon Of TallasianZachania"
Author: Joseph Henry Gaines

20. "Not wise, perhaps, to be rude to the Pope's favorite son, but my viper tongue still required a fool now and then on which to exercise its edges, and Juan Borgia served admirably in place of drunken innkeepers and tavern cheats."
Author: Kate Quinn

21. "Vegard and Riston's job today was to guard and protect me. And considering that I was in a tower room in the Guardians' citadel, it looked like a pretty plum assignment. I mean, how much trouble could a girl get into under heavy guard in a tower room? Notice I didn't ask that question out loud. No need to rub Fate's nose in something when I'd been tempting her enough lately.Phaelan had generously his guard services as well, just in case something happened to me that my Guardian bodyguards couldn't handle. Phaelan's guard-on-duty stance resembled his pirate-on-shore-leave stane of leaning back in a chair with his feet up, but instead of a tavern table, his boots were doing a fine job of holding down the windowsill. I don't know how I'd ever felt safe without him."
Author: Lisa Shearin

22. "Far too soon it had begun to seem too much of a triumph, it had been too good, too horribly unimaginable to lose, impossible finally to bear: it was as if it had become itself its own foreboding that it could not last, a foreboding that was like a presence too, turning his steps towards the taverns again. And how could one begin all over again, as though the Café Chagrin, the Farolito, had never been?"
Author: Malcolm Lowry

23. "During the settling of the American colonies, it was said that the Spaniards would first build a church, the Dutch would first build a fort and the English a tavern. Welcome to Charleston, an English colony founded in 1670."
Author: Mark R. Jones

24. "Abraham Lincoln, a predecessor of Barack Obama in both the White House and the Illinois state legislature, had eighteen months of formal education and became a soldier, surveyor, postmaster, rail-splitter, tavern keeper, and self-taught prairie lawyer. Obama went to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School, and became a "community organizer." I'm not sure that's progress--and it's certainly not "sustainable."
Author: Mark Steyn

25. "People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy."
Author: Mikhail Bakunin

26. "I worked at the Northlight Theater in Skokie, and the Mercury Theater on South Port. I actually did a show there for three years, called 'Over the Tavern.'"
Author: Nico Tortorella

27. "Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends."
Author: Norman Douglas

28. "How much more of the mosque, of prayer and fasting?Better go drunk and begging round the taverns.Khayyam, drink wine, for soon this clay of yoursWill make a cup, bowl, one day a jar.When once you hear the roses are in bloom,Then is the time, my love, to pour the wine;Houris and palaces and Heaven and Hell-These are but fairy-tales, forget them all."
Author: Omar Khayyam

29. "I don't love her anymoreSoWhy should I walkNightsBy the tavernWhere I drankEvery nightThinking of her?"
Author: Orhan Veli Kanık

30. "Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks"All those men were there inside, when she came in totally naked. They had been drinking: they began to spit. Newly come from the river, she knew nothing. She was a mermaid who had lost her way. The insults flowed down her gleaming flesh. Obscenities drowned her golden breasts. Not knowing tears, she did not weep tears. Not knowing clothes, she did not have clothes. They blackened her with burnt corks and cigarette stubs, and rolled around laughing on the tavern floor. She did not speak because she had no speech. Her eyes were the colour of distant love, her twin arms were made of white topaz. Her lips moved, silent, in a coral light, and suddenly she went out by that door. Entering the river she was cleaned, shining like a white stone in the rain, and without looking back she swam again swam towards emptiness, swam towards death."
Author: Pablo Neruda

31. "I'd heard he had started a fistfight in one of the seedier local taverns because someone had insisted on saying the word "utilize" instead of "use."
Author: Patrick Rothfuss

32. "Of all public figures and benefactors of mankind, no one is loved by history more than the literary patron. Napoleon was just a general of forgotten battles compared with the queen who paid for Shakespeare's meals and beer in the tavern. The statesman who in his time freed the slaves, even he has a few enemies in posterity, whereas the literary patron has none. We thank Gaius Maecenas for the nobility of soul we attribute to Virgil; but he isn't blamed for the selfishness and egocentricity that the poet possessed. The patron creates 'literature through altruism,' something not even the greatest genius can do with a pen."
Author: Roman Payne

33. "Neighborhood grocery stores, coal yards, gas stations, cheap taverns, big old rundown houses, a few churches with blank embarrassed faces."
Author: Ross Macdonald

34. "I forbid you from frequenting taverns, public houses, or other establishments of vice."She snorted in amusement. "Establishments of vice? That's a rather puritanical view of things, isn't it? I assure you, I was quite safe.""You were with Ralston!" he said, as though she were simpleminded."He was perfectly respectable," she said, the words coming out before she remembered that the carriage ride home was anything but respectable."Imagine—my sister and the Marquess of Ralston together. And he turns out to be the respectable one," Benedick said wryly, sending heat flaring on Callie's cheeks, but not for the reason he thought. "No more taverns."
Author: Sarah MacLean

35. "I'm not a wife, or a mother, or a pillar of the ton," she waved her unharmed arm as though the life she was describing was just beyond the room. "I'm invisible. So, why not stop being such a craven wallflower and start trying all the things that I've always dreamed of doing? Why not go to taverns adn drink scotch and fence? I confess, those things have been much more interesting than all the loathsome teas and balls and needlepoint with which I have traditionally occupied my time." She met his gaze again. "Does this make sense?"He nodded seriously. "It does. You're trying to find Callie."
Author: Sarah MacLean

36. "Then allow me to finish it. Categorically. I am happy for you to pursue all the adventure you like. Here. In this house. Under this roof. Drink until you can no longer stand. Curse like a dockside sailor. Set your embroidery aflame, for God's sake. But, as your elder brother, the head of the family, and the earl," he stressed the last words, "I forbid you from frequenting taverns, public houses, or other establishments of vice."
Author: Sarah MacLean

37. "My aunt made me an offer I had to refuse," said Jared. He looked forbidding.Kami knew that expression, and remembered the feeling that used to go with it: he was unhappy. "So you ran away from home," she said. "To become a tavern wench.""I'm not a tavern wench," said Jared. "That's not a job." His voice was slightly less stern than before, as if he was taken aback."It sounds like you're a tavern wench," Kami told him. "Fleeing persecution, you have to take up a menial occupation to keep your body and soul together. But at least its honest work, though as you labor, many predatory customers make advances and offer indignities.""One can only hope," Jared responded."
Author: Sarah Rees Brennan

38. "But I had this idea also that you don't take so wide a stance that it makes a human llife impossible, nor try to bring together irreconcilables that destroy you, but try out what of human you can live with first. And if the highest should come in that empty overheated tavern with its flies and the hot radio buzzing between the plays and plugged beer from Sox Park, what are you supposed to do but take the mixture and say imperfection is always the condidtion as found; all great beauty too, my scratched eyeballs will always see scratched."
Author: Saul Bellow

39. "As Mender came toward the bar his confident stride faltered when he realised that it was no simple aquarium for fish. It was a battle tank, and it held two dueling mermen, both near death. Open-mouthed, Mender was transfixed at the sight of flashing silver tails twisting and churning the water as each mermen sought a purchase on the other's neck and torso. The Taverner slammed down a heavy glass, forcing Mender to look down from the imprisoned creatures."
Author: T.B. McKenzie

40. "…Forgive us, O Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man,Of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire;Who fear the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night of God, the surrender required, the deprivation inflicted;Who fear the injustice of men less than the justice of God;Who fear the hand at the window, the fire in the thatch, the fist in the tavern, the push into the canal,Less than we fear the love of God."
Author: T.S. Eliot

41. "A man walked across the moors from Razorback to Lancre town without seeing a single marshlight, head-less dog, strolling tree, ghostly coach or comet, and had to be taken in by a tavern and given a drink to unsteady his nerves."
Author: Terry Pratchett

42. "And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason."
Author: Terry Pratchett

43. "Why is it that we honor the Great Thieves of Whitehall, for Acts that in Whitechapel would merit hanging? Why admire one sort of Thief, and despise the other? I suggest, 'tis because of the Scale of the Crime.--What we of the Mobility love to watch, is any of the Great Motrices, Greed, Lust, Revenge, taken out of all measure, brought quite past the scale of the ev'ryday world, approaching what we always knew were the true Dimensions of Desire. Let Antony lose the world for Cleopatra, to be sure,--not Dick his Day's Wages, at the Tavern."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

44. "Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia. Given to sentimental impulses, he thought he'd look in on the Sailor's Grave, his old tin can's tavern on East Main Street."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

45. "His tavern sign bore witness to his feats of arms. He had painted it himself, being a Jack-of-all-trades who did everything badly."
Author: Victor Hugo

Tavern Quotes Pictures