20 Quotes About Hangovers Everyone Can Sympathize With

Writers and musicians often wax poetic about their love of drink, so it’s no surprise that they have some choice words about hangovers as well. While Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson can provide positive guidance on how to drink to inspire your next great work of literature, sometimes you just need someone to commiserate with about you how bad you feel after a long night out. Here are our favorite quotes about hangovers, which may help ease the morning pain just a little.

Writers

Kingsley Amis

When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a sh*t you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is and there is no use crying over spilt milk.

Robert Benchley

A real hangover is nothing to try out family remedies on. The only cure for a real hangover is death.

William Faulkner

I think that—that anyone, the painter, the musician, the writer works in a—a kind of an—an insane fury. He’s demon-driven. He can get up feeling rotten, with a hangover, or with—with actual pain, and—and if he gets to work, the first thing he knows, he don’t remember that pain, that hangover—he’s too busy.

P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season

I am told by those who know that there are six varieties of hangover—the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie, and his manner suggested that he had got them all.

Robert Black

Happiness is waking up without a hangover.

Charles Bukowski

I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn’t dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren’t thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.

Matt Haig, The Humans

If getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.

Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

Sometimes when you get hammered till the small hours you feel pretty good in the morning, but really it's just because you're still a bit drunk. That old hangover is just toying with you, working out when to bite.

Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

His head was pounding and his vision skewed in some way and he was vaguely amazed at being alive and not sure that it was worth it.

Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

Fat Charlie was thirsty and his head hurt and his mouth tasted evil and his eyes were too tight in his head and all his teeth twinged and his stomach burned and his back was aching in a way that started around his knees and went up to his forehead and his brains had been removed and replaced with cotton balls and needles and pins which was why it hurt to try and think, and his eyes were not just too tight in his head but they must have rolled out in the night and been reattached with roofing nails; and now he noticed that anything louder than the gentle Brownian motion of air molecules drifting softly past each other was above his pain threshold. Also, he wished he were dead.

Jimmy Breslin

Don't trust a brilliant idea unless it survives the hangover.

Alex Shakar, Luminarium

He dozed off, into a dreamless oblivion, for what seemed like seconds but was in fact hours, and awoke hungover, the inner surface of his skull pulsing like a single, giant nerve being chewed by some ruminant animal.

Mark Lawrence, Prince of Fools

Some hangovers are so horrific that it seems the whole world rocks and sways around you, the very walls creaking with the motion. Others are relatively mild and it just turns out that in your drunkenness, a collection of Vikings have thrown you onto a heap of coiled ropes in their longship and set to sea.

Musicians

Drake, “Show Me a Good Time”

How bout you and all your morals in that outfit that you borrowed
Make the most out of tonight and worry bout it all tomorrow.

Atmosphere, “Sunshine”

Ain’t no way to explain or say, how painful the hangover was today
In front of the toilet, hands and knees, trying to breathe in between the dry heaves
My baby made me some coffee, afraid that if I drink some it’s probably coming right back out me
Couple of Advil, relax and chill, at a standstill with how bad I feel
I think I need to smell fresh air, so I stepped out the back door and fell down the stairs.

Dean Martin

Stay drunk.

Ali Spagnola

Kris Kristofferson, “Sunday Morning Coming Down”

Well, I woke up Sunday morning
With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad,
So I had one more for dessert.

Modest Mouse, “The Good Times Are Killing Me”

Enough hair of the dog to make myself an entire rug.
The good times are killing me.

And a Parting Word From Anna Kendrick