“The last thing a drunkard loses, you see, is his cunning: it outlasts his soul by a long season.”
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel Tower (1993), Part 1, Chapter 9, “Pages in an Old Book” (p. 301).
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Tad Williams 79
novelist 1957Related quotes
"Necessary Observations", Precept 22
Poems (pub. 1638)

“He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul.”
"A Little Cloud"
Dubliners (1914)
Context: He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen.

Quote from Manet's letter to his wife, Suzanne Leenhof, 3 December 1870; as quoted in Manet by Himself, Correspondence & Conversation; Paintings, pastels, prints and drawings, ed. Juliette Bareau-Wilson; Macdonald (1991)
1850 - 1875

“What profit it a man if he gain the whole world but in this enterprise lose his soul?”
Source: The Man in the High Castle
Dreamthorp: Essays written in the Country (1863).

“A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.”
The Mission Song (2006)