Hit the bottom and get back up; or hit the bottle and stay down.

His laugh is made of porch swings and lemonade.

If you can stop using substance or stop your addictive behavior for extended periods of time without craving, you are not dependent. You are dependent only if you can’t stop without physical or psychological distress...

I’m sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, “Yeah, but studies say...

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can’t predict anything about him...

Alcohol does not solve problems but becomes a problem in itself

Whether I or anyone else accepted the concept of alcoholism as a disease didn’t matter; what mattered was that when treated as a disease, those who suffered from it were most likely to recover.

I never had a childhood. Not like the rest of them anyway. I had a starting point from which I have never stopped running.

The whiskey was a good start. I got the idea from Dylan Thomas. He’s this poet who drank twenty-one straight whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern in New York and then died on the spot...

I pawned the remote to my misery,trading it in for liquor that was cheap;screwdrivers for my vitamin c,and a little bloodstream to my IV,helping to soothe my lunacy

it does seemthe more we drinkthe better the wordsgo.

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.

Perhaps that was just a hunch.”Barbee shivered again. He knew that he himself possessed what he called the “nose for news” – an intuitive perception of human motivations and the impending events that would spring...

But I’m not a saint yet. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius.

An elderly black man with gray hair said, “Every bottle should come with a warning: ‘This bottle may cause you to lose your job. This bottle may cause you to get a divorce. This bottle...

And in my mind, this settles the issue. I would never drink cologne, and am therefore not an alcoholic.

I’m such an alcoholic that I go to church just for communion.

After all these years, his best friend is malaria.Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old...

Kate was about to protest when something caused her to look in her mother’s direction. She was standing statue-like in front of the television with that brave, painted-on smile. Then Kate realized what had caught...

I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one-half his days and mad the other.

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...

Being crazy, for the rest of us, is a form of sanity.

I drink out of desperation. Life is too dreary to endure. The misery, loneliness, crampedness — they’re heartbreaking.[…] What feelings do you suppose a man has when he realizes that he will never know happiness...

I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into...

To give up power to change for the better is inherently distasteful to everyone, and to force people to affirm that they are addicts or alcoholics so they can speak in a meeting is shameful...

Alcoholism is a choice… not a life sentence.

Gwynn, she was always talking about wanting to be drunk and honestly I did want to encourage that, I wanted to go to a bar with her and let all the stuff sobriety pushed down...

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

I sit there and think how it isn’t fair that I can’t drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinking into a decade of hard-core drinking...

I used the boos, and not the booze, as motivation. That led to applause, which I drank up like an alcoholic. I need a refill.

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.

In retrospect, this seems to summarize all the insanity of that time. Guy is standing on top of a burning building. Helicopter arrives, hovers, drops a rope ladder. Climb up! the man leaning out of...

I dun knw things get trappedIn my mindThen itss smethin That I wanna find I dun get the answer Is there anyone listenin to me No one there to seeTo see the pain and the...

Sure, genetics do play a role in alcoholism. You’re more likely to be an alcoholic if one or both of your parents are also alcoholics. But that’s just one part of the equation; the other...

Let me ask you this: How many days do you have left, if any, in the life you promised for yourself yesterday?

I believe in ‘Positives’ not Negatives the only thing about Alcohol I’m Powerless over is those Damn Taxes

oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)

If those underlying conditions aren’t treated, the return of those symptoms may cause us so much discomfort that we’ll go back to using addictive drugs or alcohol to obtain relief. That’s the primary reason there...

Alcohol. It sucks the life out of a face and replaces it with its own dumb shine of inanity. It’s up to you. If you want to lose yourself, have a drink.

He looked as if he had been beaten to death with a wine bottle, but by doing it with the contents of the bottle.

Happiness was an evasive emotion that could not be fabricated, duplicated, or happened upon. It was something that was only handed out to a select few, but just like his mother, Ethan realized that he...

Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted...

Alcoholism is a Curse

Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested – ask any doctor – that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.

There is overwhelming evidence that certain mental disorders occur with much higher frequency among homosexuals.” For example, 40% of homosexual men have a history of major depression. That compares with only 3% for men in...

She was trying to hide it, the pain I had caused her again. Because she knew how much those tears destroyed me.

Some things just couldn’t be protectd from storms. Some things simply needed to be broken off…Once old thing were broken off, amazingly beautiful thing could grow in their place.

…you’re either gonna spend your life fucking pussy, or taking it to church.

The description of Huck’s father grabbed my full attention, and I glanced up at the book in my teacher’s hand as if to double check. My eyes bulged reflexively. Huck’s father was an abusive drunk...

…gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)