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The Lost Weekend

The Lost Weekend quotes

37 total quotes

'Bim' Nolan
Don Birnam
Gloria
Multiple Characters




View Quote Wick Birnam: There isn't a store or a bar that will give him five cents worth of credit...I went over the apartment with a fine-tooth comb - the places he can figure out!
View Quote Don: Goodbye.
Helen: Oh, oh, just a minute. [She holds out his derby hat. He takes it from her and begins walking off] My umbrella, if you don't mind?
Don: Catch. [He tosses it in her general direction and it falls on the floor at her feet]
Helen: Thank you very much.
Don: I'm terribly sorry.
Helen: You're the rudest person I've ever seen. What's the matter with you?
Don: Oh, just rude, I guess.
Helen: Really, somebody should talk to your mother.
Don: They've tried, Miss St. John.
Helen: My name's not St. John.
Don: St. Joseph, then.
Helen: St. James.
Don: First name Hilda or Helen or Harriett maybe?
Helen: Helen.
Don: All right, Helen.
View Quote Don: I'm a writer. I just started a novel. As a matter of fact, I've started several but I never seem to finish one.
Helen: Well, in that case, why don't you write short stories?
Don: Oh, I have some of those - first paragraphs. And there's one half of the opening scene of a play which takes place in the leaning tower of Pisa that attempts to explain why it leans and why all sensible buildings should lean.
Helen: They'll love that in Toledo.
View Quote Don: Let me have one, Nat. I'm dying. Just one.
Nat: No credit and you know it. Yeah, one. One's too many, and a hundred's not enough. That's all...Now go, go away...I mean it, get out of here.
View Quote I want to be alone for a couple of hours to kind of assemble myself. Is that such an extraordinary thing to want?
View Quote [when a hidden bottle is discovered] I didn't know it was there. Even if I had, I wouldn't have touched it. Do you think I wanted you out of the apartment because of the bottle? I resent that like the devil. If there's one more word of discussion, I don't leave on your blasted weekend.
View Quote You know what brand, Mr. Brophy. The cheapest. None of that twelve year old aged in wood - not for me.
View Quote [about the drink circles left on the bar] Don't wipe it away, Nat. Let me have my little vicious circle. You know, the circle is the perfect geometric figure. No end, no beginning.
View Quote What you don't understand, all of you, is that I've got to know it's around. That I can have it if I need it. I can't be cut off completely. That's the devil. That's what drives you crazy.
View Quote Come on, Nat. Join me - one little jigger of dreams, huh?
View Quote It shrinks my liver, doesn't it, Nat? It pickles my kidneys, yes. But what does it do to my mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly, I'm above the ordinary. I'm competent, supremely competent. I'm walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I'm one of the great ones. I'm Michelangelo, molding the beard of Moses. I'm Van Gogh, painting pure sunlight. I'm Horowitz, playing the Emperor Concerto. I'm John Barrymore before the movies got him by the throat. I'm Jesse James and his two brothers - all three of 'em. I'm W. Shakespeare. And out there it's not Third Avenue any longer - it's the Nile, Nat, the Nile - and down it moves the barge of Cleopatra. Come here...
View Quote That's my novel, Nat...I was to start writing it out in the country. Morbid stuff. Nothing for the Book-of-the-Month Club. A horror story! Confessions of a booze addict. The log book of an alcoholic...You know what I'm gonna call my novel? The Bottle. That's all, very simply, The Bottle. I've got it all here in my mind. Let me tell you the first chapter. It all starts one wet afternoon about three years ago. There was a matinee of La Traviata at the Metropolitan...
View Quote That's what's gonna be so hard to write. Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. It's so simple. You've gotta catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rose garden in front of her house, the ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven's Pastorale, a letter scribbled on her office stationary that you carry around in your pocket because it smells like all the lilacs in Ohio....He thinks he's cured. If he could only get a job now, they could be married and that's that. But it's not, Nat, not quite. Because one day, one terrible day...you see, this girl's been writing to her people in Toledo. They want to meet the young man. So they come to New York. They stay at the Hotel Manhattan. Their very first day, she's to introduce him to her parents, one o'clock, in the lobby of the hotel...
View Quote [about meeting Helen's parents] I couldn't face it...I couldn't face 'em, Wick, and all the questions they'd ask. I just couldn't do it, not cold. I had to have a drink first, just one - only the one didn't do anything to me.
View Quote But then there are the ones who can't take it and can't leave it either. What I'm trying to say is, I'm not a drinker - I'm a drunk. They ought to put me away once.