Quotes About Sobriety

When I was straight, I had the courage and energy to become an actress. I owe my career to my will to stop using.

I drank a lot when I was a teenager and I don't drink any more, because that's when I thought, you know, I'm gonna end up a car wreck.

Sober, he had to keep busy and purposeful, always moving. If he stopped, he immediately heard the sandstorm inside himself, and it terrified him.

You're the nice, quiet alcoholic. The good intellectual alcoholic.

Not long ago I heard a woman in her ninth month of sobriety say that before she quit drinking, she had only two emotions, anxiety and despair. "Now I have, like, too many to count," she said, "and some of them suck, but some of them are really, really good." Almost everyone in the room knew what she meant.

The knowledge that some people can have enough while you never can is the single most compelling piece of evidence for a drinker to suggest that alcoholism is, in fact, a disease, that it has powerful physiological roots, that the alcoholic's body simply responds differently to liquor than a nonalcoholic's.

Sobriety is less about "getting better" in a clear, linear sense than it is about subjecting yourself to change, to the inevitable ups and downs, fears and feelings, victories and failures, that accompany growth. You do get better—or at least you can— but that happens almost by default, by the simple fact of being present in your own life, of being aware and able, finally, to act on the connections you make.

is that in some deep and important personal respects you stop growing when you start drinking alcoholically. The drink stunts you, prevents you from walking through the kinds of fearful life experiences that bring you from point A to point B on the maturity scale.

When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

There's something about sober living and sober thinking, about facing long afternoons without the numbing distraction of anesthesia that disabuses you of the belief in the externals, shows you that strength and hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things, but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even if it's painful and you're afraid.

ultimately you could say that I don't have a problem with drugs so much as I have a problem with sobriety.

But ultimately you could say that I don't have a problem with drugs so much as I have a problem with sobriety.

Drink not the third glass, which thou canst not tame, when once it is within thee.

Me and the bottle have always been friends, we've had a few old nasty fights but the bottle would always win, so when I go to answer that final curtain call, I can hear these words being whispered by all... Ol' George stopped drinking today.

It's not easy being drunk all the time. Everyone would do it, if it were easy.

I stayed sober for this?

Becoming an ex-alcoholic, however, is not easy. Drink may be futile and ultimately degrading, but only the fortunate drinker discovers this. And it is the even more fortunate one who then comes upon a new and healthy path to the summit of his physical and mental powers. Before the liver goes, the heart enlarges and the brain begins to deteriorate, he must get the message that there is a better way to experience himself and the universe. My

I didn't fight the desire to drink anymore; I just did not drink.

The smaller the drink, the clearer the head.

Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.

They never taste who always drink; They always talk who never think.

Every moderate drinker could abandon the intoxicating cup if he would; every inebriate would if he could.

The smaller the drink, the clearer the head, and the cooler the blood.

No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey.