"Drinking, Smoking, & Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times"

That is the title of the book I just finished and loved. Dorothy Parker kicks off the anthology with "You Were Perfectly Fine," a story about a woman reassuring a man the day after he had gotten seriously drunk and remembered little. She is hilarious and although she wrote it in 1928, the story spoke directly to me in 2008. In the story "Preface to a Book of Cigarette Papers" by Don Marquis (1919) , I found a great quote worth sharing:

We have never been the person on earth we should like to be; circumstances have always tied us to the staid and commonplace and respectable; but when we become an angel we hope to be right devilish at times. And that is an idea that some one should work out - Hell as a place of reward for the Puritans. But it is possible that that elderly Mephistopheles, with the smack of a canting Calvinistic archangel about him, Bernard Shaw, has already done so somewhere.

Right devilish at times...seems I have already figured this one out a bit. But I harbor the same hope as Mr. Marquis. That's all. For now.