Quotes About Open Bars

“You never want to be the first one of your friends to get married. If you are, just resign yourself to the fact that your wedding will be a shitshow. Most people are still single, open bars are a novelty, and no matter how elegant the wedding was planned to be, it will end up looking like a scene out of Girls Gone Wild.”

— Jennifer Close

“There is the image of the man who imagines himself to be a prisoner in a cell. He stands at one end of this small, dark, barren room, on his toes, with arms stretched upward, hands grasping for support onto a small, barred window, the room's only apparent source of light. If he holds on tight, straining toward the window, turning his head just so, he can see a bit of bright sunlight barely visible between the uppermost bars. This light is his only hope. He will not risk losing it. And so he continues to staring toward that bit of light, holding tightly to the bars. So committed is his effort not to lose sight of that glimmer of life-giving light, that it never occurs to him to let go and explore the darkness of the rest of the cell. So it is that he never discovers that the door at the other end of the cell is open, that he is free. He has always been free to walk out into the brightness of the day, if only he would let go. (192)”

— Sheldon B. Kopp

“The door to heaven is open to us at any time we are willing to accept that we are of absolutely no importance. The bars of our own hell - the "mind-forged manacles" as Blake put it - are our attempts to justify ourselves or prove our self-worth. Accept that none of this matters and we can see that heaven is all around us. It is there in a child's smile, in the rain that waters the earth, even in the maggots that rise in new life from dead meat. All around us is evidence that life and love are eternal and unbroken by strife and suffering.”

— Aussiescribbler

“Are they given in exchange for the glory of an African sunrise, for the twilight breeze whispering through the palms, for the green shade of the matted, tangled vines, for the cool, big-starred nights of the desert, for the patter of the waterfall after a hard day's hunt? What, I ask you, are they given in exchange for THESE? Why, a bare cage with iron bars; an ugly piece of dead meat thrust in to them once a day; and a crowd of fools to come and stare at them with open mouths!-No, Stubbins. Lions and tigers, the Big Hunters, should never, never be seen in zoos.”

— Hugh Lofting

“The warden always seems to know which book to bring. When the sun is gunslinger blue, the warden brings a western. When rain slates against the towers and the world has gone hopeless with gray, it is Bible stories. When the halls ring with the cries of riot and the bars of my own cell rattle with pain, the warden drops a soft book on the floor, solace in its pages: the collected poems of Walt Whitman. And oh, my favorites, like the tastes of childhood. Every few months the warden passes me The White Dawn, and for a few precious days I traverse the open heavens on hard-packed moonlit snow and see the blue splashing arctic lights, and I fill my belly with frozen seal meat and laugh with my Inuit friends.”

— Rene Denfeld

“The temperature in the gym reached 125 degrees, qualifying anyone there to be served rare.
"Could we," Dr. Henneman said, wafting her hands about, "open those back doors, let a little air in? Please?" ...
Miles Paterini and Pete Couvier ... pressed down on the metal bars. The doors didn't open.
People actually gasped.
Dennis began calculating the amount of oxygen left in the gymnasium.
Dr. Henneman's doctorate in school administration had prepared her for this.
"Is Mr. Wrona here?"
Mr. Wrona, the school custodian, was not here. He was at home watching women's volleyball with the sound turned off and imagining the moment everyone realized the back doors were locked.”

— Larry Doyle

“I open the orangutan's door and set a pan of fruits, vegetables, and nuts on the floor. As I close it, her long arm reaches through the bars. She points at an orange in another pan.
'That? You want that?'
She continues to point, blinking at me with close-set eyes. Her features are concave, her face a wide platter fringed with red hair. She's the most outrageous and beautiful thing I've ever seen.
'Here,' I say, handing her the orange. 'You can have it.'
She takes it and sets it on the floor. Then she reaches out again. After several seconds of serious misgivings, I hold out my hand. She wraps her long fingers around it, then lets go. She sits on her haunches and peels her orange.
I stare in amazement. She was thanking me.”

— Sara Gruen

“The glass door swung open and two big, homely women walked in looking guilty. They were the kind of women who, out of sheer loneliness, end up doing kinky stuff with candy bars and wake up with apple fritters in their hair.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

“I like the city late at night, the blasts of music and the splashes of light cast from bars that are still open, shoals of brightly-dressed clubber, the beeping taxis and the greasy, savoury smell of meat and onions from the burger vans.”

— Mhairi McFarlane

“I saw Orin in bars or at post-tournament dances go up to a young lady he would like to pick up and use this fail-safe cross-sectional pick-up Strategy that involved an opening like "Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I'll affect the demeanor of that man." Which in a way of course is being almost pathologically open and sincere about the whole picking-up enterprise, but also has this quality of Look-At-Me-Being-So-Totally-Open-And-Sincere-I-Rise-Above-The-Whole-Disingenuous-Posing-Process-Of-Attracting-Someone-,-And-I-Transcend-The-Common-Disingenuity-In-A-Bar-Herd-In-A-Particularly-Hip-And-Witty-Self-Aware-Way-,-And-If-You-Will-Let-Me-Pick-You-Up-I-Will-Not-Only-Keep-Being-This-Wittily,-Transcendently-Open-,-But-Will-Bring-You-Into-This-World-Of-Social-Falsehood-Transcendence, which of course he cannot do because the whole openness-demeanor thing is itself a purposive social falsehood; it is a pose of poselessness; Orin Incandenza is the least open man I know.”

— David Foster Wallace

“Is that you, Sergeant Angua?" said a voice in the gloom. A lantern was open, and lit the approaching face of Constable Visit. As he drew near, she could just make out the thick wad of pamphlets under his other arm.
"Hello, Washpot," she said. "What's up?"
" ... looks like a twist of lemon ... " said a damp voice from the shadows.
"Mister Vimes sent me to search the bars of iniquity and low places of sin for you," said Visit.
"And the literature?" said Angua. "By the way, the words "nothing personal" could have so easily been added to that last sentence.”

— Terry Pratchett

“It is very much easier to shatter prison-bars than to open undiscovered doors to life.”

— D.H. Lawrence

“I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

“The Panther
His gaze is from the passing of bars
so exhausted, that it doesn't hold a thing anymore.
For him, it's as if there were thousands of bars
and behind the thousands of bars no world.
The sure stride of lithe, powerful steps,
that around the smallest of circles turns,
is like a dance of pure energy about a center,
in which a great will stands numbed.
Only occasionally, without a sound, do the covers
of the eyes slide open-. An image rushes in,
goes through the tensed silence of the frame
only to vanish, forever, in the heart.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“On nights like this, when he rode out from the dark, silent house to the dark, deserted park, he could
forget.
He could be nothing but a solitary rider on a fast horse, wind in his face and the world open around him.
No walls, no bars, no quiet weeping or screams or death. None of that could catch him. On a night like
this, none of it could find him.”

— Suzanne Enoch

“I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar-that's wonderful.”

— Raymond Chandler

“The inside is packed with people. Lots of them crowding the bar, passing drinks back for people to carry to tables. A bunch of guys are pouring shots of vodka.
"To Zacharov!" one toasts.
"To open hearts and open bars!" calls another.
"And open legs," says Anton.”

— Holly Black

“The skilful closer needs no bolts or bars, while to open what he has shut will be impossible;”

— Lao Tzu

“Thus dwelt together in love these simple Acadian farmers,- Dwelt in the love of God and of man. Alike were they free from Fear, that reigns with the tyrant, and envy, the vice of republics. Neither locks had they to their doors, nor bars to their windows; But their dwellings were open as day and the hearts of the owners; There the richest was poor, and the poorest lived in abundance.”

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“You too are an exile, I thought. You morn for the broad open steppes where you have room to spread your icy wings. Here you feel stifled and constricted, like an eagle that cries and beats against the bars of its iron cage.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

“Mental ghettos are not mirages; they actually exist in palpable reality: being "open" inside one's mental or intellectual ghetto does not open its door but simply allows one to harbour the illusion that there is no ghetto and no door. The most dangerous prisons are those with invisible bars.”

— Tariq Ramadan

“Keep the bars open-we're coming home.”

— Jonathan Toews

“Like a bird, when his cage is opened, stays on his perch, dazzled by freedom, the postponed traveler does not see that his cage, with its bars of anxiety, it is open.”

— Andre Maurois

“All these practices and struggles to become religious are only negative work, to take off the bars, and open the doors to that perfection which is our birthright, our nature.”

— Swami Vivekananda