Quotes About Addiction

Addicts and alcoholics will tell you that their recovery began when they woke up in pitiful and degraded enough shape to take Step Zero, which is: Ã¢â'¬Å"This shit has got to stop.

It took me one more year to admit that I could no longer control my drinking. And finally on July 7, 1986, I quit, and let a bunch of sober alcoholics teach me how to get sober, and stay sober. God, they were such a pain in the ass.

that getting all of one's addictions under control is a little like putting an octopus to bed.

Getting all your addictions under control is like trying to put an octopus to bed

my disease wanted me dead, but would settle for getting me drunk...

Kill the pain. I don't smoke or drink anymore. I'm too worried to gamble, too guilty to shoplift, and I've always hated clothes shopping. So what choices did that leave? I could go on a strict new diet or conversely, I could stuff myself to the rafters with fat, sugar and carcinogens. Ding! Ding! We have a winner.

His hands would soon be trembling and he would have indigestion, but he didn't care. When you love coffee you abandon everything to that love.

When you love coffee you abandon everything to that love.

I'm too much the slave of my own obsessions and fascination.

He took another quick swallow of the coffee. Tasted awful to him, though it was good coffee, he'd brewed it himself. A beer was what he wanted. Not to have a beer right now was like not breathing. But it was just too great a risk.

Soy demasiado esclavo de mis propias obsesiones y de mi propia fascinación.

And a month later all these guys are going 'I don't know why I don't feel very good', and I'm going 'You wanna know why you don't feel very good? I'll tell you why—because you've done nothing else for weeks but lie on the floor and smoke and take my money'. I was making 50 dollars a week cleaning for the guy who did our albums.

The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.

The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?

That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.

The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

It wasn't an itch. It was a sickness. It was poison blazing through him, thinking of her all the time, watching her, touching her, wanting and wanting and wanting until his mind went black.

Mindfulness helps us see the addictive aspect of self-criticism— a repetitive cycle of flaying ourselves again and again, feeling the pain anew.

IMAGINE RECLAIMING ALL THE ENERGY that could be available to us but isn't because we scatter it, squandering it on endlessly regretting the past, worrying about the future, berating ourselves, blaming others, checking Facebook yet again, throwing ourselves into serial snacking, workaholism, recreational shopping, recreational drugs.

Day Two/5:00 AM: Addicts are often hyper-vigilant about others talking behind their backs or slandering them. Our sponsors tell us that what "they" think of us is none of our business. It can still be hard to take. It matters not if someone speaks badly of me; I live so no one believes it.

What's the difference between bulimics and anorexics? I ask. Anorexics are anorexics all the time, she says, I'm only bulimic when I'm throwing up. Wow. She sounds just like my dad! I'm only an alcoholic when I get drunk. There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. Penelope gorges on her pain and then throws it up and flushes it away. My dad drinks his pain away. (107)

But I'm also addicted to books. And I know there has never been a human being or a television show, no matter how great, that could measure up to a great book.

My sister is running away to get lost, but I am running away because I want to find something. And my parents love me so much that they want to help me. Yeah, Dad is a drunk and Mom is an ex-drunk, but they don't want their kids to be drunks.