SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: SOBRIETY

  • “Be kind to drunk people, for every one of them is fighting an enormous battle.”

    — Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

  • “Alcoholism is a self-diagnosis. Science offers no biopsy, no home kit to purchase at CVS. Doctors and friends can offer opinions, and you can take a hundred online quizzes. But alcoholism is something you must know in your gut.”

    — Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

  • “The misery of calorie restriction is well documented, but what people rarely mention is that it’s also a bit fun. How much hunger can I tolerate? How much joy can I withhold? What a perverse pleasure, to be in charge of your own pain.”

    — Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

  • “Let’s get a drink,” we say to each other, when what we mean is “Let’s spend time together.” It’s almost as if, in absence of alcohol, we have no idea what to do. “Let’s take a walk in the park” would be met with some very confused glances.

    — Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

  • I needed alcohol to drink away the things that plagued me…My self-consciousness, my loneliness, my insecurities, my fears.  I drank away all the parts that made me human, in other words, and I knew this was wrong…But when the lights were off, and I lay very quietly in my bed, I knew: There was something fundamentally wrong about losing the narrative of my own life.

    — Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

  • “So I drank myself to a place where I didn’t care, but I woke up a person who cared enormously.”

    — Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

  • “I loved drinking alone in distant bars, staying on speaking terms with my own solitude.”

    — Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

  • “The greatest desire of alcoholics is they want to drink like normal people and it’s not going to happen.”

    — Joe Balzer

  • And so I sipped my one glass of red wine.  Just one.  And I let it roll along the sandpaper of my tongue.  And the wine was better this way.  Tiny sips.  And it floated through my bloodstream like a warm front.  And it would not be an overstatement to say this felt like the very point of existence.  To savor each moment.

    Then I ordered another glass.

    — Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

  • “I felt stuck, though.  Stuck in a life that was easy and indulgent and yet I could not get enough in my mouth.”

    — Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget