Quotes About Addiction

Success is very much like a drug: it makes you feel good; you don't know what you are missing until you experience it; once you experience it, you want more; and in your attempts to recapture that first high, you will have to resort to ever bigger "doses." And if success is like a drug, some drugs are like success: a cocaine high, I am told, very much resembles the rush of success.

let me beseech you to resolve to free yourselves from the slavery of the tea and coffee and other slop-kettle,

A recent study shows that one hundred per cent of youngsters on hard drugs had at some time in their lives listened to so-called pop music

This is what I mean by quitting surfing. When you surf, as I then understood it, you live and breathe waves. You always know what the surf is doing. You cut school, lose jobs, lose girlfriends, if it's good.

Virtual Reality is like mainlining television.

Addictions [...] started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were [...] less intelligent than goldfish.

Somebody tells you they drink because they're a failure, it ain't so. They're a failure because they drink. And they drink because it's so damn hard not to. But as long as they have a bottle that isn't empty, they never feel far from being happy. ("Bums")

Now Violet had let herself go until she could barely make it out of the house to buy her Oreos and booze. But if you looked closely, beneath the folds of flesh ravaged by bitterness and drink, you could see the lovely creature she had been, and what she had been then was just as bitter and vindictive as what she was now.

If Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist wasn't addicted to the pain-killing drug his doctor prescribed, but instead it was just that the drug had 'established an interrelationship with the body, such that if the drug is removed precipitously, there is a reaction,' you needn't question that his decisions might have been influenced by his drug addiction.

familiar process before they can acknowledge how comprehensive their problem is. First, they deny that there's something wrong with their life. Then they intensify their efforts to follow the old failing plan. Then they try to treat themselves with some new thrill: They have an affair, drink more, or start doing drugs. Only when all this fails do they admit that they need to change the way they think about life.

Much like the rat that presses the lever for more cocaine and forgets to eat, we'll crave music that pushes our buttons but has no sustenance.

Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them.

But being an addict means that you never stipulate to being an adult. You may, as the occasion requires, adopt the trade dress of a grown-up, showing responsibility and gravitas in spurts to get by, but the rest of the time, you do what you want when you want.

It was a daylight waterfall of regret known to all addicts. It can't get worse, but it does. When the bottom arrives, the cold fact of it all, it is always a surprise. Over fiteen years, I had made a seemingly organic journey from pothead to party boy, from knockaround guy to friendless thug. At thirty-one, I was washed out of my profession, morally and physically corrupt, but I still had almost a year left in the Life. I wasn't done yet.

Sometimes addiction seems more like possession, a death grip from Satan that requires supernatural intervention. Absolution from end-stage chemical obsession tends to force otherwise faithless men to their knees.)

Every addict is formed in the crucible of the memory of that first hit.

Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them. Was I faking it then, or am I faking it now? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I make up?

Addicts know the voices in their heads can't be trusted, and that is precisely why there are so many of us out there in the ultra marathon community, moving forward one step at a time. And that's what Nico and I did—one step followed by another until we got to Hope Pass.

She pulled the phone back to look at her photo, then, drawn by its ruthless intensity, kissed the image. Her lips left semen smears on the screen. Commodity fetishism at its finest.

A Rescuer isnt always a person. Addictions to alcohol or drugs, sexual addiction, workaholismall the ways we numb outcan rescue the Victim from feeling his or her own feelings.

Mahatma Gandhi claimed that betting was a more pernicious evil than drinking.

I've never felt better. I've never been healthier…. I run four or five miles, four or five times a week, but I broke both my legs running too much last summer. I had stress fractures in both my tibias from running too much. You know, once you're an addict, you're always an addict, so just because I found something good to do doesn't mean I'm not going to hurt myself doing it.

What if a chemical, either found in nature or cooked up in a lab, could tap into the motivational circuit and drive dopamine neurons artificially from within the brain? Intriguingly, this may be exactly how drugs of abuse work. Although different drugs of abuse have distinct molecular targets and very different behavioral effects, they all drive the electrical activity of dopamine neurons or the release of dopamine from these cells (while nonaddictive brain-targeted drugs like Prozac do not).5

My own view of the relationship between drugs and PTSD is reminiscent of what Frank Sinatra said when a reporter asked him about his philosophy of life—"Basically, I'm for anything that gets you through the night—be it prayer, tranquilizers, or a bottle of Jack Daniel's.