Wealth & Money Quote by Robert Quine

Self-destruction here isn’t romanticized; it’s filed under “what I did that summer,” like a temp gig you don’t put on your resume. Quine’s voice lands with a musician’s deadpan: Brooklyn, drinking, sick of it, then the Strand. No epiphany, no moral cleansing, just a switch in routines. That flatness is the point. It treats chaos and recovery as adjacent lifestyle choices, not a dramatic arc, which quietly rebukes the myth that artists need to be burning to be real.

The verb “drank my way through” makes addiction sound like transit, a method of getting from one place to another. Then “I stopped when I got sick of that” frames quitting less as virtue than as boredom and bodily revolt. It’s not redemption; it’s fatigue. That’s a very New York kind of pragmatism: you don’t conquer your demons, you change shifts.

The Strand detail does cultural work. A bookstore job is a halfway house for the bohemian competent: surrounded by literature, near the scene, still clocking in. Calling it “a little better than the tax job” is the real tell. He’s ranking forms of employment the way musicians rank venues - not by prestige, but by psychic damage. The subtext is class and compromise: even in the orbit of music, life is still wage work, still triage. Quine makes that unglamorous machinery audible, and that’s why the quote sticks.