Quotes About Recovery

The only thing I'm addicted to is winning. This bootleg cult, arrogantly referred to as Alcoholics Anonymous, reports a 5 percent success rate. My success rate is 100 percent.

I think I have a duty as a recovering guy to help, to make my knowledge of what I went through accessible.

Our only means of true intimacy with a child is the power of recovering our own childhood.

The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

John is a physician, and perhaps--(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)--perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster

Society mends its wounds. And that's invariably true in all the tragedies, in the comedies as well. And certainly in the histories.

Robbins had opened Gabby up. Her charred skin was peeled back, and her ribs were removed. She was pink inside, like steak that had been burned on a high heat but remained raw in the middle.

He had talked to hundreds of witnesses. And he knew that if someone felt pressured, they would try too hard, and their imagination would fill what their memory couldn't recover.

I had seen people who had lost everything and everyone they loved to war, famine, and natural disasters.

I'd seen better days, but I wasn't about to instigate widespread panic with my appearance, either. I made a show of washing up and pretending that I was an ordinary, civilized woman who was, perhaps, recovering from a bad date—and who had most certainly not been hiding bodies in anybody's basement.

Yes, bad things happened to you—really bad things. But you survived them! Now that chapter's closed, and you can… well, you don't have to forget any of it. You don't have to pretend it never happened. But you've got the whole rest of your life to live, so how are you gonna live it?

You're half-dead, yet you have the vigor to philander? I was stabbed, not castrated.

Perhaps opening his heart to the Lord could be the first step in opening his life to a chance at happiness again.

It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.

It was good. It was like something inordinately beautiful and out of this world. Like I'd found an actual planet that I didn't know had been there all along. Planet Heroin. The place where there was no pain.

Afterwards, I limped around gathering rocks and built a small crap cairn, burying the evidence before hiking on.

ou let time pass. That's the cure . You survive the days. You float like a rabid ghost through the weeks. You cry and wallow and lament and scratch your way back up through the months. And then one day you find yourself alone on a bench in the sun and you close your eyes and lean your head back and you realize you're okay.

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise. The real me was beneath that, pulsing under all the things I used to think I knew.

You should see a therapist, everyone had told me after my mother died, and ultimately—in the depths of my darkest moments the year before the hike—I had. But I didn't keep the faith. I never did call the other therapist Vince had recommended. I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

Heroin had made me dumb and distant from myself. A thought would form and then evaporate. I could not quite get ahold of my mind, even when I wasn't high.

my physical suffering some of my emotional suffering would fade away.

One hot afternoon during the era in which you've gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin, you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She'll offer you one of the balloons, but you won't take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You're wrong. You do.

You know how alchoholics who go to AA are always using that phrase "one day at a time"? They say that because to say "I will never drink again" is just too damn much. It's big an hard and bound to fail.

It's cool to be a part of recovery. This is just who I am, this is what I write about, what I do, and most of my work has been a reflection of what I've been going through in one way or another.