Bartenders Quotes

Life is wonderful and strange...and it's also absolutely mundane and tiresome. It's hilarious and it's deadening. It's a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our lives we oscillate between awe and tedium. I think stories are the place to explore that inherent weirdness; that movement from the fantastic to the prosaic that is life....

What interests me - and interests me totally - is how we as living human beings can balance the brief, warm, intensely complicated fingersnap of our lives against the colossal, indifferent, and desolate scales of the universe. Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. Rocks in your backyard are moving if you could only stand still enough to watch. You get hernias because, eons ago, you used to be a fish. So how in the world are we supposed to measure our lives - which involve things like opening birthday cards, stepping on our kids' LEGOs, and buying toilet paper at Safeway - against the absolutely incomprehensible vastness of the universe?

How? We stare into the fire. We turn to friends, bartenders, lovers, priests, drug-dealers, painters, writers. Isn't that why we seek each other out, why people go to churches and temples, why we read books? So that we can find out if life occasionally sets other people trembling, too? ~ Anthony Doerr

Lady bartenders live a tougher life than anybody knows.
Dancing Bear ~ James Crumley

The whiskey was a good start. I got the idea from Dylan Thomas. He's this poet who drank twenty-one straight whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern in New York and then died on the spot from alcohol poisoning. I've always wanted to hear the bartender's side of the story. What was it like watching this guy drink himself out of here? How did it feel handing him number twenty-one and watching his face crumple up before the fall of the stool? And did he already have number twenty-two poured, waiting for this big fat tip, and then have to drink it himself after whoever came took the body away? ~ Michael Thomas Ford

I mean, I've had bartenders and waiters and waitresses make a comment about a joke of mine, like pointing out some sort of logic error or something that I've never even thought about, and they're right. ~ Todd Barry

In the world we live in, priests and bartenders have a lot in common. ~ Flavia Biondi

Few places are more charming than a quiet cocktail lounge in the middle of the day with the ice tinkling in the glasses and the starched look of a bartender's white shirt and the clarity of the beer in the glass with the bubbles drifting up. ~ Robert B. Parker

The bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. ~ William Gibson

Handsome guy, Victor, in a brutal, black-Irish way. Like most New York bartenders, he was really an actor, or was it the reverse? ("Novelty") ~ John Crowley

One would never defeat one's circumstances by working and saving one's pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear. It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else - housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers - would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities. ~ James Baldwin

In New York, we tip everyone. We tip doormen, we tip cab drivers, and we tip bartenders at the bar. You'll get quite an evil eye if you don't leave a tip at the bar. ~ Zach Braff

An efficient bartenders first aim should be to please his customers, paying particular attention to meet the individual wishes of those whose tastes and desires he has already watched and ascertained; and, with those whose peculiarities he has had no opportunity of learning, he should politely inquire how they wish their beverages served, and use his best judgment in endeavoring to fulfill their desires to their entire satisfaction. In this way he will not fail to acquire popularity and success. ~ Jerry Thomas

She(Pam) said you had a habit of killing the bartenders of Fangtasia," Felicia said, her lovely doe eyes wide
with amazement. "She said I must come to beg your mercy. But you just seem like a human, to me. ~ Charlaine Harris

Sophara scrawled orders on a slate and handed it to one of the libationarians, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the contents and locations of all the bottles kept the bar running. ~ Scott Lynch

The streets of every city in America are filled with men who would pay all the money they could lay their hands on to be transformed, even for a day, into hairy, hard-fisted brutes who walk all over cops, extort drinks from terrified bartenders and roar out of town on big motorcycles after raping the banker's daughter. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

... what happens to most of these people anyway? They have their fling and then they vanish. They have to take jobs eventually as telephone operators, bartenders, partners in a lamp shop in some little town in the San Fernando mountains ... and others take their places ... but mostly they just vanish, and you forget about them unless you hear, one day, a certain song. ~ Andrew Holleran

Bruno was a musician with the temperament of an anarchist and the breath of a bartender's dishrag. He gave the lie to bookselling as a genteel occupation. ~ Sheridan Hay

Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other. ~ Joel Spolsky

He had a habit of remarking to bartenders that he didn't see any sense in mixing whiskey with water since the whiskey was already wet. ~ Joseph Mitchell

They know you can't get people to stop smoking, so they develop a system of informants. That's the whole idea of second-hand smoke, you know. Make second-hand smoke dangerous and turn everybody against smokers. Then they say you can't even smoke in a bar
a bar!
because bartenders have a right to a smoke-free "workspace." Ah, bartenders, those health nuts ... ~ Fran Lebowitz

The bar staff and croupiers all wore black with the same green triangle logo emblazoned on their shirts, and contact lenses which made their eyes shine an eerie, vibrant green. The bar optics glowed with the same green light, the intensity of which was linked to the music. As the bartender walked away to fetch the drinks, a breakdown in the techno track commenced and the bottles began to palpitate. The bartender's eyes glowed with a hallucinatory felinity that made Mangle feel nervous. ~ R.D. Ronald

Emily told us. "I would never go on a first date somewhere in my town because I know all the waiters. I know all the bartenders. I know everybody. ~ Aziz Ansari

Watched as they flashed clips of people dancing, bartenders fixing whatever drink was en vogue, and a montage of interviews with delighted patrons. Maybe I really should try going out, it looks like fun ... but drunk people always look like they're having a good time. ~ Amber Lynn Natusch

There are few professions whose primary objective is to advance the cause of humanity rather than simply to make money or accrue power. Among this limited group of humanitarians I would number teachers, nurses, bookstore owners, and bartenders. ~ Jack McDevitt

I know now that there's a hole inside me. A hole that can't be patched or filled with files or paperwork or legal cases or new clothes or miles or happy hours or bartenders. This was never about the water. It's not even about Kaycee, not really. It's about me. ~ Krysten Ritter

The bartenders are the regular band of Jack, and the heavenly drummer who looks up to the sky with blue eyes, with a beard, is wailing beer-caps of bottles and jamming on the cash register and everything is going to the beat - It's the beat generation, its béat, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown. ~ Jack Kerouac

It's all part of the bartender's creed: make them fresh, make them cold, but most of all, if they're a little overeager, make them wait. ~ William Lashner