I couldn’t stop so I quit.

When you are young your body cannot handle alcohol, and when you get old your mind cannot handle it. Either way, alcohol has its way.

…there is a saying used in twelve-step programs and in most treatment centers that “Relapse is part of recovery.” It’s another dangerous slogan that is based on a myth, and it only gives people permission...

Alcoholism or addiction is a disease because it fits the definition of disease. It is progressive and chronic, and left untreated, it will kill.

Spurred by Amy’s death I’ve tried to salvage unwilling victims from the mayhem of the internal storm and am always, always just pulled inside myself.

His eyes are so clear and blue that nothing but clichés enter my mind.

When people who believe themselves to be addicts or alcoholics come under great stress or trauma, they mentally give themselves permission to drink or use drugs as a remedy.

Blackouts can be fun if approached with the right mindset. You just can’t sweat the fact that you’ve lost a small portion of your life for all eternity. Occasionally, little bubbles of memory will float...

A drinking man’s someone who wants to forget he isn’t still young and believing

I mean, that’s at least in part why I ingested chemical waste – it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column...

I found the prospect daunting, but somehow comforting, too, because the counselors insisted it could be done, and, after all, many of them were recovering alcoholics themselves.

Reaction timeTouch the underside of a penny you find on the streetDoesn’t feel any different unless you close your eyesI can taste the copper in my mouth nowseeping from between my teethThere’s an explanation I’m...

The only thing we chase our shots with are high-fives.

When it’s summer, people sit a lot. Or lie. Lie in the sense of recumbency. A good heavy book holds you down. It’s an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin...

When I walked into the house, I went in search of one of my dad’s bottles. Not that they were that hard to find. He hid bottles all over the house. I knew where they...

Treatment for dependency at substance abuse treatment centers must change if alcoholism and addiction are to be overcome in our society.

Question for your life: If Ted Kennedy made it to heaven, do you think he’s pleased with the fact that Jesus can turn water into wine?

What was so painful about Amy’s death is that I know that there is something I could have done. I could have passed on to her the solution that was freely given to me. Don’t...

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...