Best 263 quotes in «alcoholism quotes» category

It's the captain. He looks fresh shaved. My own face is covered in little wires that amount to nothing but the look of dirt. It is a kind of dirt, things that grow out from me. It means I have dirt deep inside of me. A head full of dirt, maybe. When I've had a few, a nice soft dirt. Otherwise I am livewired, hungry-eyed like a scorned wolf, but give the appearance of a nervous boy, tittering along in search of something, namely, another drink.

It's the same whether we eat margarine or don't. Dull translation jobs or fraudulent copy, it's basically the same. Sure we're tossing out fluff, but tell me, where does anyone deal in words with substance? C'mon now, there's no honest work anywhere. Just like there's no honest breathing or honest pissing." "You were more innocent in the old days." "Maybe so," I said, crushing out a cigarette in the ashtray. "And no doubt there's an innocent town somewhere where an innocent butcher slices innocent ham. So if you think that drinking whiskey from the middle of the morning is innocent, go ahead and drink as much as you want." The room was treated to an extended pen-on-desktop staccato solo.

It used to be that each time you fell in love, the effort of loving released in you the energy to hold everything together a little longer. Then, after several months or years, when things began to crack apart again, you would fall in love with someone else. New energy would be released, and for a time you and your world would be safe once more. By now, however, you have exhausted that. There seems to be no energy left - if you had discovered alcohol earlier it might have saved a few broken hearts. For you, alcohol is not the problem - it's the solution: dissolving all the separate parts into one. A universal solvent. An ocean.

It was clear to her now, Happiness was a seductive illusion. No one as fucked up as her deserved one drop of joy. But oh god was it delicious when it fell into her lap for a little while. (Such a pretty face) she muses (with such a bruised and battered soul). When the dawn of a promise fades into the dusk of reality, all that remains is the nightmare. Sweet, sweet loneliness. Shadows come to play and prey on her beaten mind. Her lovely little dreams of poison.

It wasn't so much about breaking free of him, as it was about breaking free of me.

It was your choice to sleep with her Gavin! It didn't just happen!

I understood why women went back to their abusers. The monster wasn't your real husband, he was a bad dream - an alien of sorts - who took over the spirit of your beloved one. He entered and left your husband. It was your real love you welcomed back in.

I've heard many recovering alcoholics say they've never found a church quite like Alcoholics Anonymous. They've never found a community of people so honest with one another about their pain, so united in their shared brokenness.

I want to feel calm and at ease. Like someone who lives in Half Moon Bay, California, and makes hummus from scratch. Instead, I feel like I'm a contestant on some awful supermarket game show where I've got sixty seconds to hurl my shopping cart down the aisles, piling it with as much as possible before the buzzer goes off.

I was a degenerate, with an insatiable capacity for perversion. Incapable of change. I could do anything except not drink.

It was an accident mummy” I cry out. She’s pulling me up by my hair and dragging me down the hall “So were you” she screams “you were a fucking accident, you ruined everything, you’re still ruining everything, it's all your fault" she pulls me into the kitchen and throws me down on to the floor.

It wasn't fair to pull her into that vortex, because I couldn't be fixed. And Roxy was a fixer. She thought she could help me, I could see it in her eyes.

It wasn't fair that my friends could stay at Captain Morgan's pirate ship party while I was drop-kicked into a basement with homeless people chanting the Serenity Prayer.

It will all be over in 2 weeks

I understood drinking to be the gasoline of all adventure.

I use to drink every day without a care until I released the Demons that now I must bare

I was never afraid of anything because I never hurt anyone. I was always an old drunk. [Mexico City concert, June 2011]

Liver failure is the easiest way to say 'no' to alcohol.

Logan couldn’t remember when a few drinks became a bottle and then two bottles every night. He couldn’t point to one single moment or event as the cause. From his first drink at fourteen, alcohol began soaking into his skin, the moisture rotting him on the inside. Every few years he’d use a chisel to hack away all the wet, unsound wood without trying to find the source of the moisture. The rot always came back, stronger than before.

Los borrachos están indefectiblemente solos. Los suicidas vienen acompañados al menos por otra persona, en general varias más. Que tal vez era la idea en un principio. Mínimo dos agentes de la policía de Oakland. Al final he entendido por qué el suicidio se considera delito.

Maybe it was that brokenness inside of Bentley that I recognized and drew me to him, I didn't know. I just remember thinkin' how I wanted to know more about him. And I wanted to make him smile. Cause' that boy never smiled.

Millions of deaths would not have happened if it weren’t for the consumption of alcohol. The same can be said about millions of births.

I've lived with many alcoholic men over the years, and each has taught me that it is useless to worry, fruitless to ask why, suicide to try to help them. They are who they are for better and worse.

Military exercises were considered a joke, and work unnecessary drudgery. The next step down was alcoholism. It appears to have descended upon the whole army overnight. L' ivrognerie -- drunkenness -- had made an immediate appearance, General Ruby noted, and in the larger railroad stations, special rooms had to be set up to cope with it, euphemistically known as 'walls of de-alcoholizing'. So many men were so drunk in public that Commanders began to worry about civilian morale.

I was born three drinks short of comfortable...'" "But I knew what that guy meant about the way he was born three drinks short. It made me think about the first beer I ever drank, down at North Beach with a bunch of kids one summer night. It made me think about that first exquisite relief. It made me think about my ex-husband, Scott, who always said I should stop after the third drink. "That's when you get out of control," he'd say. I had no idea what we was talking about. After a couple of drinks is when I start to feel IN control.

My alcoholism is in no way any sort of excuse for any of my past behaviors. Just because I quit drinking, my life was not suddenly transformed into a tabula rasa-if I have wronged someone, drunk or not, then the responsibility for this lies squarely with me. And I must do my best to set things square with that person. ... ....And just because I am sober now does not mean anyone else should care. I do not deserve a cookie for finally trying to act like a decent human being.

my kids never saw me drink any alcohol

My father gave me everything he had. Everything I had I gave to alcohol.

My sponsor is an ex-Navy guy. Buys me lunch on Christmas. I tell him, as long as I am drinking and I have money, things seem to be going well. Now, you just replace “am drinking” with “have oil” there you have the U.S. economy. When I don’t drink for a while… I get a little depressed and anti-Semitic. I tell him, as soon as the United States stops fucking up foreign democracies and stealing their oil, I’ll stop drinking. Unfortunately, looks like neither miracle is going to happen…

Nación en que abundan los hijos de alcohólicos, ésta condenada a vivir en el desconcierto, en la vacilación, en la festinación y en la inconstancia.

No one can practice the precepts perfectly, including the Buddha... Boiled vegetables contain dead bacteria. We cannot practice the First Precept or any of the precepts perfectly. But because of the real danger in our society--alcoholism has destroyed so many families and has brought about much unhappiness--we have to do something. We have to live in a way that will eradicate that kind of damage. That is why even if you can be very healthy with one glass of wine every week, I still urge you with all my strength to abandon that glass of wine (76).

No one ever found any answers at the bottom of a bottle. Not the point, of course. The point of reaching the bottom of the bottle is generally to forget the questions.

Not poor? How can you sit there and say that with a straight face? Why I remember your momma told my momma once that your daddy got drunk and spent his paycheck and you had to pick up beer bottles alongside the road for lunch money and you had holes in the bottoms of your shoes. You had to line them with newspapers. If that ain’t poor, I sure don’t know what is.

- Mr. Alakbarov, how much is the rent for this fantastic apartment? - Madam, this is the red wine aisle of the grocery store.

my kids never saw me drink any alcohol. I have zero kids and Im pretty good at hiding my booze too.

Now I’m sober and I realize, I didn’t drink to escape the world, I drank to escape myself

Now I see that it isn't the problems along the way that make us or break us. It's how we learn to stand and face them that makes the difference.

One cannot properly drink without self-deception: the lips have to deny the liquor that just passed down the throat. It was surely for the relief of drunkards that the Lord God did not write upon the stone tablets the commandment: thou shalt not lie. The word has to deny the addiction. Among the tribe of alcoholics, lying is a badge of honor - the truth is first an indiscretion, later an affront, and finally a source of despair. If you truly drink, you have to announce to all and sundry that you do not drink; if you admit you drink, that means you do not truly drink. True all-out drinking has to be concealed; anyone who reveals it is giving in, confessing to helplessness, and all that remains for him is weeping, the gnashing of teeth, and the 12 step program.

Of the small number of things which I have liked and done well, drinking is by far the thing I have done best. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk more than the majority of the people who drink.

one doesn't even think of the liver and if the liver doesn't think of us, that's fine.

One minute, I'm a tragically average, fair and freckled eighth-grader with algebra homework. The next, I'm one who has swallowed liquor. I'm a rebel. I'm a line-crosser.

One of the most conspicuous modes of escape is alcoholism, which is now a national catastrophe.

One weekend it rained for 48 hours without stopping. The rain beat like bony fingers against the window panes. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Fungus was growing on the walls. I polished off a bottle of gin sitting huddled over the two-bar electric fire and wrote a poem, one of the few that has lasted through the moves and the years. It is called 'Where Can I Go?' If this is not the place where tears are understood where do I go to cry? If this is not the place where my spirits can take wing where do I go to fly? If this is not the place where my feelings can be heard where do I go to speak? If this is not the place where you’ll accept me as I am where can I go to be me? If this is not the place where I can try and learn and grow where can I go to laugh and cry?

Only discovering and healing the root causes of each individual's dependency puts an end to dependency. One-on-one sessions are key because the individual issues at the core of dependency are just that- completely individual.

Ô, wine!, the truth-serum so potent that all those who wish to live happy lives should abstain from drinking it entirely!... except of course when they are alone.

Not much more than a broke disgrace who's hooked on tonics, so excuse him if his poker face has puke on it.

Over and above this, however, she found that half of her honestly desired to stay. As well as the courage, she lacked the pure inclination to go which she had felt a few moments ago. A new sensation had replaced it. A permeating coma, a warm haze of noises and conversation, wrapped her comfortably around – together with something more. What that something more was she did not quite know. She sat there and let it flow through her. It was a glow, and a kind of premonition. It was certainly a spiritual, but much more emphatically a physical, premonition of good about to befall. It was like the effect on the body of good news, without the good news – a delicious short cut to that inconstant elation which was so arduously won by virtue from the everyday world. It engendered the desire to celebrate nothing for no reason. She asked herself whether this was intoxication. She decided that at any rate it was a foretaste of it, and in a flash understood what had been a closed book to her until now – the temptations and perils of alcohol. She decided that she was growing up – that yet another of the veiled mysteries of the world had been illuminated by experience. Experience – that was the thing. Sitting there, she exulted in experience.Over and above this, however, she found that half of her honestly desired to stay. As well as the courage, she lacked the pure inclination to go which she had felt a few moments ago. A new sensation had replaced it. A permeating coma, a warm haze of noises and conversation, wrapped her comfortably around – together with something more. What that something more was she did not quite know. She sat there and let it flow through her. It was a glow, and a kind of premonition. It was certainly a spiritual, but much more emphatically a physical, premonition of good about to befall. It was like the effect on the body of good news, without the good news – a delicious short cut to that inconstant elation which was so arduously won by virtue from the everyday world. It engendered the desire to celebrate nothing for no reason. She asked herself whether this was intoxication. She decided that at any rate it was a foretaste of it, and in a flash understood what had been a closed book to her until now – the temptations and perils of alcohol. She decided that she was growing up – that yet another of the veiled mysteries of the world had been illuminated by experience. Experience – that was the thing. Sitting there, she exulted in experience.

People who are dependent are merely using alcohol as a crutch to get through the day. Yet doctors and scientists are still treating "alcoholism" as if it is the problem, when it has nothing to do with the problem. They might as well be studying "scratchism" for people who have a chronic itch.

...people who don't live at least a little bit in fear, have nothing left to live for.

People who quit drinking become terrified they will lose their power. They believe booze makes them the people they want to be...Alcohol is one hell of a pitchman, and perhaps his greatest lis is convincing us we need him, even as he tears us apart.