SO GOOD QUOTES

  • Many, if not most, alcohol and drug addicts eventually free themselves from the clutches of addiction on their own, without therapeutic help

    Self-change from problems with alcohol and drugs: A scoping review of the literature since 2010
    Florian De Meyer, Nellie Bencherif, Clara De Ruysscher, Lou Lippens, Wouter Vanderplasschen

  • “Someday alcohol will stop working for you. And you are left in this horrible hamster wheel of chasing something you used to know, and it never comes back.”

    —Janelle Hanchett

  • They say the drink is not worth all the pain it eases

    i_o & Lights – Prayers

  • He sympathized with me and said, ‘The same thing happened to my own brother and what do you think helped him? His spiritual father gave him a copy of the Gospels with strict orders to read a chapter without a moment’s delay every time he felt a longing for wine coming over him. If the desire continued he was to read a second chapter, and so on. That is what my brother did and at the end of a very short time his drunkenness came to an end.

    The Way of a Pilgrim

  • One of the most famous sidetracks is pride.  Having overcome an over-eating problem or a drinking problem or an addiction or bad habit of one sort or another, instead of being humbly thankful for one’s new life, the reformed person becomes puffed up at his or her success.  In such cases, the person may be worse off than before, from a spiritual perspective.  And this pride can take on a whole range of hues and tones so that it does not appear as pride, so that it seems to be nothing more than so-called self-esteam or a new passion to be better and better at fitness, or healthy eating or even preaching the evils of self indulgence.  Pride hides behind many masks.

    —Fr. Michael Gillis, A Small Affliction Born For God’s Sake

  • “You can’t rescue a brother who needs to save himself.”

    —Julia Cameron,The Artist’s Way

  • “As with gluttony, the more single-mindedly we pursue something for the pleasure we can get from it, the less likely we are to find our desire for pleasure satisfied.”

    —Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies

  • “The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.”

    — F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

  • “Your mind is like an unsafe neighborhood; don’t go there alone,” explains Augusten Burroughs in Dry, his memoir about overcoming alcoholism. While therapy and coaching certainly makes braving “unsafe neighborhood” in our head easier, it can only go so far. It’s not like our therapist can actually climb inside our brain and evict all the bad guys. We can begin making the dangerous places in our mind safe again by choosing the right daily activities.

    The Irresistible Introvert: Harness the Power of Quiet Charisma in a Loud World
    Michaela Chung

  • David Foster Wallace: …and I felt stuck. And it’s not like I felt stuck because I drank, okay? It was like I felt my life was over at 28, and I felt really bad. I did not want to feel that, and so I did all sorts of stuff. I would drink real heavy, I would fuck strangers. Sometimes I would not drink at all, not drink at all for two weeks, but instead, I would run 10 miles every morning in a desperate, like a very American ‘I will fix this somehow by taking radical actions’ sorta thing.

    David Lipsky: And here you are promoting this acclaimed book. That’s not bad.

    David Foster Wallace: [long sigh] David, this is nice. This is not real.

    The End of the Tour (2015)