Those who nurse secrets, nurse a chaotic world of amplified silence.

Drugs suck more than anything else I have ever liked so much.

I didn’t want to take it. I knew it was a powerful drug, but I also knew it was a catabolic drug that consumed the body.

I don’t care what you think about it. So you have a choice. I can sit here and do it in front of you, or I can keep running into the bathroom so you don’t have to see. Either way, it’s going to happen, so it’s just about how bad it’s going to make you...

You are not an alcoholic or an addict. You are not incurably diseased. You have merely become dependent on substances or addictive behavior to cope with underlying conditions that you are now going to heal, at which time your dependency will cease completely and forever.

If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts […] That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted...

Every single one of them with their eyes open and on him, their mouths, too, halfway screaming, halfway begging. Offering themselves to him, because the call was irresistible despite being recognizable. They were moths who know what the light is, know what it will do to them. And come anyway.

Sitting cross-legged on her bed, I watch her take out her gear. She’s been smoking so much the room stinks of it. Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen her do it so often I’ve resisted the urge. It’s surreal, like I’m watching me from outside my body. My willpower is fragile at the best...

Sex had nothing to do with feeling good, everything to do with superficialities, and was always accompanied by a masochistic agenda to feel anything but dead inside.

I understand addiction now. I never did before, you know. How could a man (or a woman) do something so self-destructive, knowing that they’re hurting not only themselves, but the people they love? It seemed that it would be so incredibly easy for them to just not take that next drink. Just stop. It’s so...

I smoked my first pipe with Seth. I knew the stuff was bad, but I was so tired of being the cop, begging and ragging at him, throwing Pampers in his face when he walked in the door. I wanted to be on the same side again. So I smoked with Seth one afternoon when...

I might be manipulating you to create risk for myself.

It was definitely a gambling addiction that started about four years ago,

I am a work in progress.

It is time to embrace mental health and substance use/abuse as illnesses. Addiction is a disease.

So it persists, for many of us, hunger channeled into some internal circuitry of longing, routed this way and that, emerging in a thousand different forms. The diet form, the romance form, the addiction form, the overriding hunger for this purchase or that job, this relationship or that one. Hunger may be insatiable by nature,...

This is the kind of thing that makes sense to them; this is a language they know. They know what to do with`disease’. They know how to attach a doctor’s medical descriptions to hope.

This is the point where the knowing, irony-infused author laughs along with his readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity Kool-Aid. That’s some other book. Slogans saved my life. All of them–the dumb ones, the preachy ones, the...

Competition works best in sports, but humans get addicted to stuff.

Whether the underlying cause of your dependency is a chemical imbalance, unresolved events from the past, beliefs you hold that are inconsistent with what is true, an inability to cope with current conditions, or a combination of these four causes, know this: not only are all the causes of dependency within you, but all the...

I ended up going into this big art historical argument.’ [Barry Blinderman] invoked, for example, Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, painted in the sixteenth century for a monastery where monks cared for people with skin diseases—so the suffering Christ in that painting shows symptoms of skin disease. ‘It’s because he’s the man of sorrows,’ Blinderman argued....

The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant.

Stephanie, I’m begging you. Eat some doughnuts. I can’t keep going like this.” – Morelli

The battle for self-control over an intense undesired habit consists of an endless series of skirmishes, in which our urges and our better angels clash several times each day.

So are you an inmate or a rubbernecker?” she asks.”Rubbernecker,” I answer without hesitation. “You?””I’m a screw. Or on staff, anyway. Used to be an inmate. Repeat offender. Crimes against my body. Puking sickness followed by heroin, which led to more puking sickness.” I’d be surprised at her forthrightness, but that’s addicts for you. The...

After I binged last night -or was it tonight – I was convinced yet again that there were people coming to get me. It was more than just shadows and voices, more than just fantasies….it was real, and I was scared to my core.My bones were shaking…m heart was pounding…I thought I was going to...

There’s a pattern of brain changes that we have shown is common across various types of addiction that we’ve also seen in pathologically obese individuals,

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.

That was the problem with love, though, wasn’t it. It couldn’t be helped, couldn’t be controlled. It just roared in and took whatever it wanted, destroyed whatever it wanted; the most dangerous addiction of all, because nobody survived it intact. But an addiction that was impossible to let go.

I couldn’t stop so I quit.

Intensity-seeking is an enslavement of our own perpetuation. When we step out of the delirium of always seeking someone new, and meet the same old sad and lonely child within, our healing journey begins. Exhausting ourselves with novelty is a defense against our deepest pain, one that we cannot outrun. But once we stop and...

I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the day.”(Interview with The Booklovers blog, September 2010)

Oftentimes winning can become an addiction, whether good or bad, to the point where you would rather lose it all before you lose at all.

Every person in the AA program who’s successful is living proof that he or she does have power over addictive drugs and alcohol- the power to stop.

Johnny, I have celebrity status and I have a lot of money. I could fly planes out to deliver me the dope if I wanted to — and that’s what I would do. I can’t escape.

Passion creates, addiction consumes.

This will sound strange, and yet I’m sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself.

most effective treatments for methamphetamine addiction are cognitive behavioral interventions – designed to help modify the patient’s thinking, expectancies and behaviors, and to increase skills in coping with various life stressors.

Life isn’t like a Full House episode. There isn’t going to be an easy out to every conflict. There is no milkman, paperboy, or evening TV. There are good moments and bad moments and not everything will tie together nicely in the end. But that’s life, and I think I’m finally starting to get it.

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.

As often is the case with addictions, the fanciful notion of a gradual discontinuance only provided a comforting pretext for more sustained indulgence.

Love is the purest religion and the most destructive addiction!

Oh and P.S.? I am in dire need of more coffee. Industrial strength.””But we’re going to sleep soon,” I say.”I know.” Laila shudders. “Addiction is a bitch.

Your lowest moment and life can be your best if you survive it and learn from it

Don’t kid yourself by saying that one time can’t make you addicted. It can. I believed it couldn’t too when I first tried meth. I was so, so wrong. The worst part about it is that you won’t realize what has happened immediately afterwards. Addiction is a gradual process and it doesn’t happen overnight. But...

It’s strange how what drives us may abandon us midstream, how what tickles our ears with lies one moment may tell us truths that knock us on our emotional ass the next. After all, it is an unbelievably real world, with Darwin scribbling his thoughts into books and telling us what monkeys we are. Each...

She’s relaxing more. She laid off Healthy Addiction and pounced.

If I were to create a word that more accurately describes alcoholism and addiction, I would say it was dependencyism. Sounds silly, doesn’t it? Yet it’s no sillier than the word alcoholism. The reason alcoholism no longer sounds silly to you is because you’re used to hearing it, reading it, and thinking about it.

…most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.

It starts raining harder, I’ve got a long way to go walking and pushing that sore leg right along in the gathering rain, no chance no intention whatever of hailing a cab, the whiskey and the Morphine have made me unruffled by the sickness of the poison in my heart.