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Alcoholism Quotes

Browse 435 quotes about Alcoholism.

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Alcoholism Quotes

“I tried to book a flight to her mind, but I’m not on the list. And now I’m terminal: I’m breathing brandy. I’ve incorporated another tally mark on my wrist. I get my vitamins in: colored capsules I call candy. Life is just a bunch of dashes— Interrupted sentences with no finish line. But at least if you wet your eyelashes, You can get a cinematic look in life.”

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Book:Can I Tell You Something?
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“What would his fear smell like if he learned she'd used him, slept with him, to keep herself at bay? To settle that writhing darkness that had simmered inside her from the moment she'd emerged from the Cauldron? Sex, music, and drink, she'd learned this past year- all of it helped. Not entirely, but it kept the power from boiling over. Even if she could still feel it streaming through her blood, coiled tight around her bones.”

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Book:A ​Court of Silver Flames
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“The joy of being a REAL alcoholic, is that you just want booze, and nothing else. You've lost faith in God, and people (except Mom maybe), and government, and you know deep in your heart that all you really want to do is drink on the beach somewhere, all day long, forever. even after all the stupid steps. All 12 of them, thoroughly, you know you just want a goddamn beer. Maybe they'll put THAT in the next edition big book.”

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Author:Dmitry Dyatlov
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“I don't hear it much anymore... but... I guess people do sometimes ask... well why don't you go back to Russia.... Well I'm sorry I can't help it I guess Im stuck in this shithole for a while. My aunt married some Jew and then we won a "lottery" and my daddy (pussy little bitch) decided to come to this shithole and make me go to school with fucked up Jews and learn english and shit. Then I became an alcoholic in college. Then I worked for the government a bit and that REALLY fucked me up. Now I'm just waiting for them to catch up, make some amends and pass the Universal Basic Income so I can go back to drinking. Rigorous honesty, every single day.”

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Author:Dmitry Dyatlov
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“We are sneaking psychedelics back into our society through research like the MDMA research that's going on, through the research for the use of marijuana for pain, through research with the dying [with psilocybin], and ultimately we will do the same kind of stuff about alcoholism, about prison rehabilitation, so on. I mean, its obvious that psychedelics, properly used, have a behavior-change psychotherapeutic value. But from my point of view, that is all underusing the vehicle. The potential of the vehicle is sacramentally to take you out of the cultural constructs which you are part of a conspiracy in maintaining. And giving you a chance to experience once again your innocence.”

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Author:Ram Dass
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“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 my belly. (p. 52)”

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

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Book:The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death
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“...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)”

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Book:The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death
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“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.”

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Book:The Jailing of Cecelia Capture
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“Like alcohol and poverty, a heartbreak has the power to make a man do something he wouldn’t normally do and to make a woman do someone she wouldn’t normally do.”

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Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“I'm sitting in front of the TV, watching Jerry Springer, and it makes me think of how many mad people there are in the world, and whether everyone is mad deep down, they just pretend they're not, and it's the people in asylums or on Jerry Springer who are the honest ones. I have a notebook and a chewed-up pen, and I'm trying to think of a topic for the Youth Issues speech. Mrs Thomas says she thinks I have a lot to say, but I don't. Nothing I can put words to anyway. I could talk about bullying, or alcoholism, but I don't think I could speak about that out loud, it's too real, and it'd be like I was standing up there naked. More than naked. It would be like my skin was all peeled off and I was just standing there with my heart all bloody and thumping in my rib cage for everyone to see.”

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Book:Yellow
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“Hitch: making rules about drinking can be the sign of an alcoholic,' as Martin Amis once teasingly said to me. (Adorno would have savored that, as well.) Of course, watching the clock for the start-time is probably a bad sign, but here are some simple pieces of advice for the young. Don't drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food. Don't drink if you have the blues: it's a junk cure. Drink when you are in a good mood. Cheap booze is a false economy. It's not true that you shouldn't drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain. Hangovers are another bad sign, and you should not expect to be believed if you take refuge in saying you can't properly remember last night. (If you really don't remember, that's an even worse sign.) Avoid all narcotics: these make you more boring rather than less and are not designed—as are the grape and the grain—to enliven company. Be careful about up-grading too far to single malt Scotch: when you are voyaging in rough countries it won't be easily available. Never even think about driving a car if you have taken a drop. It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't ever be responsible for it.”

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Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“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.”

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Book:The Mighty Angel
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“You don't have to go back to the way things were. Just go back to the point where you left off. Don't start over... just keep going, but there's a right way of keeping going. And no one here is going to be angry at you for leaving. We all have to leave sometimes. And some of us never come back. But there's always a choice, even if you've already decided never to return. You can still come back from this. That is the only kind of faith that matters. Not in the world, not in...God..., not in our friendship... just in yourself.”

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Book:Return to the Madlands
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“Smoking is Good (Sonnet Satire, 1320) Smoking is good for the planet, For it screws with the lungs. Alcohol is good for the planet, For it screws with the brain. Bullets are good for the planet, They riddle the body with holes. Bombs are good for the planet, They blow up all, body and soul. Autocracies are good for the planet, They cause civilizations to fall. Mindless tech is good for the planet, Our biggest wonder will be our downfall. Whatever kills the humans, heals the planet. Forget AI, human greed is the biggest threat.”

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Book:Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets
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“It is true that even then it [alcohol] was known and acknowledged that many were greatly injured by it; but none seemed to think the injury arose from the use of a bad thing, but from the abuse of a very good thing. The victims of it were to be pitied and compassionated, just as are the heirs of consumption and other hereditary diseases. Their failing was treated as a misfortune, and not as a crime, or even as a disgrace. If, then, what I have been saying is true, is it wonderful that some should think and act now as all thought and acted twenty years ago? and is it just to assail, condemn, or despise them for doing so? The universal sense of mankind on any subject is an argument, or at least an influence, not easily overcome. The success of the argument in favor of the existence of an overruling Providence mainly depends upon that sense; and men ought not in justice to be denounced for yielding to it in any case, or giving it up slowly, especially when they are backed by interest, fixed habits, or burning appetites.”

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Author:Abraham Lincoln
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“In my judgment such of us as have never fallen victims [to alcoholism] have been spared more by the absence of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have. Indeed, I believe if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice—the demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and of generosity. What one of us but can call to mind some relative, more promising in youth than all his fellows, who has fallen a sacrifice to his rapacity? He ever seems to have gone forth like the Egyptian angel of death, commissioned to slay, if not the first, the fairest born of every family.”

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Author:Abraham Lincoln
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“Bonnie was so drunk she could hardly walk. ... I had always felt sorry for her, having to live the life she was living, never a minute’s peace. She had often told me she was happier when she had something to drink. So I did not blame her for staying drunk most of the time, if it made her feel better.”

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Book:My Life with Bonnie and Clyde
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“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 just like mine. The boy was hopeful that a corpse found near the river was actually his dad, but it turned out not to be. It was spooky how high my hopes rose for the boy, and then sank so utterly low when the body was discovered to be a female in disguise. I should’ve mourned for the woman, but it was the boy I felt bad for.”

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Book:Dandelions: The Disappearance of Annabelle Fancher
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“When men are depressed, they try to find an escape. Yes, we fare worse than women, who have ample support systems in place. To us men, intoxication seems to be the only way out. Nobody gives a damn about a depressed man, you see. Man up! Don’t be a sissy! That’s what we are constantly told.”

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Book:The World's Most Frustrated Man
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“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?”

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Book:Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
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“He jerked his arm back, nearly launched the car keys into the sea, stopped just short of letting go. He needed the car, now more than ever. The idea flattened him. His arm fell limp to his side, the keys back in his pocket. Draining the rest of his whiskey, he settled for hurling the glass into vast ocean darkness. The bottle followed shortly after, though he stumbled in the throw and ended up breaking it on the end of the pier. He made his way back to the laptop. He didn’t learn anything important. Story of his life.”

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Book:The War Beneath
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“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 at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.' All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was: There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man! Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.”

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Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Alcohol is a far greater killer than all opiates. You can buy alcohol on any street corner throughout the world. It gets your brain, your liver. It destroys your morals, destroys your vitality, kills the sexual potential, and you become sluggish. It was a great pity that Prohibition failed. The experiment was too radical. Instead of barring it altogether, the dispensation of alcohol should have been under prescription, or some other control. Prohibition was one of the worthiest attempts of a group to impose their will upon the rest of the people. But of course if you prohibit something you deprive people of an essential liberty; when you deny the right of choice you oppose the greatest gift in the world. People will not stand for it. Alcohol makes man mad, leads to such strange behaviourism. Yet beer and liquor ads maintain newspapers, television, some huge portion of the national and the world economy. Drinker that I am, I think essentially I am the victim of an addiction that is here in the world, revealed to all, exposed to all. It is there. We who are weak take to it and are destroyed by it, but is essentially a weakness of governments everywhere to allow this poison to circulate like a river through the bloodstream of the human race. As one of the heartiest drinkers in the world, I speak with a voice of authority.”

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Book:My Wicked, Wicked Ways
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“And I was sure it was the drink that irrigated White’s self-sabotage, for it is the common trait of alcoholics to make plans and promises, to oneself, to others, fervently, sincerely, and in hope of redemption. Promises that are broken, again and again, through fear, through loss of nerve, through any number of things that hide that deep desire, at heart, to obliterate one’s broken self.”

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Book:H is for Hawk
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