Quotes About Alcoholism

Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.

The drunk's concern ain't that he's goin to die from drinkin - which he is. It's that he's goin to run out of whiskey fore he gets a chance to do it.

Alcohol ruined me financially and morally, broke my heart and the hearts of too many others. Even though it did this to me and it almost killed me and I haven't touched a drop of it in seventeen years, sometimes I wonder if I could get away with drinking some now. I totally subscribe to the notion that alcoholism is a mental illness because thinking like that is clearly insane.

Whether I or anyone else accepted the concept of alcoholism as a disease didn't matter; what mattered was that when treated as a disease, those who suffered from it were most likely to recover.

Make him stop drinking'. He prayed every night. 'Lord, let my father die', he prayed very often. 'Let him not be killed at pit', he prayed when, after tea, the father did not come home from work.

Why were drunks, almost always, persons of talent, personality, lovable qualities, gifts, brains, assets of all kinds (else why would anyone care?); why were so many brilliant men alcoholic?

The alcoholic, to get liquor, will do everything that the drug-addict will do to get drugs, everything but one: and that is murder. Cut off from drink, he'll lie to get it, beg, plead, wheedle, borrow, steal, rob—all the crimes in the catalogue. But he won't kill for it. That's the difference between the drunk and the drug-addict. But the only one.

At the corner he stopped in the liquor store to buy a pint. He pretended to deliberate a moment, considering the various brands, knowing all the while he would buy the bottle that was just under a dollar as he always did, no matter how much money he had in his pocket; for he had a dread of running out of cash and being cut off from drink and so bought only the cheapest, to make it last. Liquor was all one anyway.

The problem of money. He knew that if he had money—was suddenly left a lot of money, or found it, or stole it—he would kill himself in a month. Well, why not, what difference did it make, that would be his own affair. If he wanted to drink himself to death, whose business was it but his own?

The worst disease which can afflict business executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism it's egotism.

When a man spends his relief checks on green whiskey his children have a way of crying from hunger pains.

All my life, I had this idea that if I could unravel the mystery that was my mother, then I could help save her. But it didn't really work. We were close, but she struggled with mental illness and alcoholism, and it was rough at times.

I work as my father drank.

Every one of Dad's colleagues would eventually commit suicide, most by gunshot to the head, and every woman in their circle except for my mother would become a dysfunctional alcoholic. But in the fifties, they were all riding high.

If you think I'm a drunk, you shoulda seen my old man.

Now he asked, his voice as careful and unslurred as only a true alcoholic's can be, whose turn it was to tell a tale.

The old man had been tanned by the light of too many beer signs, and it just goes to show that you can't live on three packs of Chesterfields and a fifth of bourbon a day without starting to drift far too fuckin' wide in the turns.

Treatment for dependency at substance abuse treatment centers must change if alcoholism and addiction are to be overcome in our society.

father's drinking—did I mention that?

You could drink hard liquor in the middle of a school day without people assuming you were an alcoholic underachiever. Strange how in America in the 1950s, at the height of its industrial and imperial power, men drank double-martinis for lunch. Now, in its decline, they drank fizzy water. Somewhere something had gone terribly wrong.

Ich weine, wissend, daß Tränen eines Säufers nicht zählen, kein Gewicht haben- und ich spüre etwas, das ich nicht Gewissensbisse, sondern einfach Schmerz nennen möchte.

And I was sure it was the drink that irrigated White's self-sabotage, for it is the common trait of alcoholics to make plans and promises, to oneself, to others, fervently, sincerely, and in hope of redemption. Promises that are broken, again and again, through fear, through loss of nerve, through any number of things that hide that deep desire, at heart, to obliterate one's broken self.

And I was sure that it was the drink that irrigated White's constant self-sabotage, for it is a common trait of alcoholics to make plans and promises, to oneself, to others, fervently, sincerely, and in hope of redemption. Promises that are broken, again and again, through fear, through loss of nerve, through any number of things that hide that deep desire, at heart, to obliterate one's broken self.

My dad was the town drunk. Most of the time that's not so bad but New York City?