Quotes About Addiction

I never knew how strong a drug other people are.

I never knew how strong a drug other people are." "The strongest. Or at least the most widely abused." "How long does it take to . . . detox?" He considers. "Nobody's ever clean.

I never knew how strong a drug other people are. The strongest. Or at least the most widely abused. How long does it take to . . . detox? He considers. Nobody's ever clean.

addicted to a rate of stimulations per second that she hasn't entirely kicked.

When she speaks again, the softness shatters him. "I never knew how strong a drug other people are." "The strongest. Or at least the most widely abused." "How long does it take to . . . detox?" He considers. "Nobody's ever clean.

That's what happens in the early stages of contemplation. We wait in silence. In silence all our usual patterns assault us. Our patterns of control, addiction, negativity, tension, anger, and fear assert themselves. That's why most people give up rather quickly. When Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, the first things that show up are wild beasts (Mark 1:13). Contemplation is not first of all consoling. It's only real.

We each have our inner program for happiness, our plans by which we can be secure, esteemed, and in control, and are blissfully unaware that these cannot work for us for the long haul—without our becoming more and more control freaks ourselves. Something has to break our primary addiction, which is to our own power and our false programs for happiness.

We are all spiritually powerless, however, and not just those physically addicted to a substance, which is why I address this book to everyone. Alcoholics just have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways, and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments, especially our addiction to our way of thinking.

Stinking thinking" is the universal addiction. Substance addictions like alcohol and drugs are merely the most visible form of addiction, but actually we are all addicted to our own habitual way of doing anything, our own defenses, and most especially, our patterned way of thinking, or how we process our reality.

All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency on them.

All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency on them. There are shared and agreed-upon addictions in every culture and every institution. These are often the hardest to heal because they do not look like addictions because we have all agreed to be compulsive about the same things and blind to the same problems.

I personally describe contemplation as "non-dual consciousness" and find that it is necessary to overcome the "stinking thinking" of most addicts, which tends to be "all-or-nothing thinking."3 We could say that authentic spirituality is invariably a matter of emptying the mind and filling the heart at the same time.

pattern of thinking as normative, logical, and surely true, even when it does not fully compute. We keep doing the same thing, over and over again, even if it is not working for us. That is the self-destructive, even "demonic," nature of all addiction—and of the mind

We are all spiritually powerless, however, and not just those physically addicted to a substance, which is why I address this book to everyone.

The body is like the ignored middle child in a family unit, and so now it is having its revenge through so much compulsive eating, sexuality, anorexia, and addiction, plus a wholesale disregard for the physical planet, animals, water, and healthy foods.

Stinking thinking' is the universal addiction." This is one of the most stunning, succinct, and profound sentences I've ever read. And this is indeed a book for anyone and everyone who cannot stop creating trances and numbness via alcohol, drugs, sex, workaholism, or toxic, obsessive thinking.

As Carol Bialock writes in her poem, we cannot stop the drowning waters of our addictive culture from rising, but we must at least see our reality for what it is, seek to properly detach from it, build a coral castle, and learn to breathe under water. The New Testament called this salvation (some might call it enlightenment); the Twelve Step Program calls it recovery.

Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man.

Once she started going to church, she couldn't stop. She attended Mass the way drunks went on binges. She couldn't get enough. In church she felt safe and secure. Not even my father would dare violate its cool, dark sanctity. She took me along for company.

There was probably some kind of anti-compulsive psychiatric medication liberally added to this trucked-in gross of cookies so that people like me, who could not stop eating the cookies once they were offered, would not continuously sneak down to the lobby in the soul-slaughtering hours between two and four a.m. to steal six at a time, finishing most of them before getting back to the room.

Sugar and caffeine. My willpower crumbled.

If you're losing the battle against a persistent bad habit, an addiction, or a temptation, and you're stuck in a repeating cycle of good intention-failure-guilt, you will not get better on your own! You need the help of other people. Some temptations are only overcome with the help of a partner who prays for you, encourages you, and holds you accountable.

These were ideal conditions for the creation of his magnum opus, and Ramsay was hammering on the Remington's keys and shuttling its carriage with abandon, fuelled by nothing more than Lipton's tea and a tin of cocaine throat pastilles that he'd cadged off one of the dancers at the Sphinx.

The only way to stop the tears was to keep drinking the whisky.