“What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist.”— Amy Reed, amazon.com
“Mirrors on the ceiling, The pink champagne on ice And she said 'We are all just prisoners here, of our own device' And in the master's chambers, They gathered for the feast They stab it with their steely knives, But they just can't kill the beast. Last thing I remember, I was Running for the door I…”— Eagles, youtube.com
“The Moth don't care when he sees The Flame. He might get burned, but he's in the game. And once he's in, he can't go back, he'll Beat his wings 'til he burns them black... No, The Moth don't care when he sees The Flame. . . The Moth don't care if The Flame is real, 'Cause Flame and Moth got a sweeth…”— Aimee Mann, youtube.com
“There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away.”— Sherman Alexie, amazon.com
“The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict? The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really k…”— Williams S. Burroughs, amazon.com
“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’…”— Marie Sexton, amazon.com
“I recall when after having had my fill of her after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred — I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my…”— Vladimir Nabokov, amazon.com
“It has all of the characteristics of addiction. You focus on the person, you obsessively think about them, you crave them, you distort reality, your willingness to take enormous risks to win this person. And it's got the three main characteristics of addiction: tolerance, you need to see them more,…”— Helen Fisher, ted.com
“I've also come to believe that romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it's going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it's going poorly.”— Helen Fisher, ted.com
“I don’t need to talk about how I need a drink, I need a reason not to drink.”— Poussey Washington, newrepublic.com
“Alcohol was an escalating madness, and the blackout issue was the juncture separating two kinds of drinking. One kind was a comet in your veins. The other kind left you sunken and cratered, drained of all light.”— Sarah Hepola, amazon.com
“Not taking a drink was easy. Just a matter of muscle movement, the simple refusal to put alcohol to my lips. The impossible part was everything else. How could I talk to people? Who would I be? What would intimacy look like, if it weren’t coaxed out by the glug-glug of a bottle of wine or a pint of…”— Sarah Hepola, amazon.com
“We all want to believe that our pain is singular - that no on else has felt this way - but our pain is ordinary, which is both a blessing and a curse. It means we're not unique. But it also means we're not alone.”— Sarah Hepola, amazon.com
“God, I hope my kid doesn't end up in rehab. Or: God, I hope my kid doesn't end up in therapy...When we say things like that, though, we underscore the false belief that people who seek help are failures and people who don't seek help are a success. It's not true. Some of the healthiest, most accompl…”— Sarah Hepola, amazon.com
“I chose to share both the good and the bad parts of my story, and of my imagination, so that it might help even one person realize that there is hope. You are not alone. And it does get better. I promise you it’s worth it.”— Kimberly Nalen, amazon.com
“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.”— Chris Prentiss, amazon.com
“At the bottom of every person's dependency, there is always pain, Discovering the pain and healing it is an essential step in ending dependency.”— Chris Prentiss, amazon.com
“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.”— Chris Prentiss, amazon.com