Addiction Quotes

You have to take it off the table,' Jeremy said, finally. 'It's always going to be an option, otherwise. You're going to have to give it up and mean it, or it'll always be your solution when things go bad.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

Perhaps nothing so accurately characterizes dysfunctional families as denial. The denial forces members to keep believing the myths and vital lies in spite of the facts, or to keep expecting that the same behaviors will have different outcomes.Dad's not an alcoholic because he never drinks in the morning, in spite of the fact that he's drunk every night.

~ John Bradshaw

In a way, we’re all addicts by nature.

~ Shannon Mullen

I look away from her. “I have felt like an old man my whole life. And they get to have fun and snort their fucking drugs and get wasted and it doesn’t matter who they’re hurting because they’re young and having fun and I’m a judgmental prick if I say anything.” “Do you think they’re having fun?” I don’t have an answer for her. “I’ll never be able to compete against it.” “Maybe you don’t understand how powerful it is,” she says. “How powerful is it?” “Very.” “And that’s an excuse?” “No.” “When do they get to take responsibility?” “For themselves?” she asks. “Yes.” “Always,” she says.

~ Kenny Porpora

Sometimes I think, Was she thinking about me when she was drinking? Did any of them ever think about me when they were putting straws in their noses and needles in their arms? Did they even think about me once?” And she asks me, “What would it mean if they didn’t?” I stare at her, trembling. She knows what I think it means, and she wants me to say it out loud.

~ Kenny Porpora

Sometimes, I worry I'm winning.

~ Kris Kidd

The addiction crisis is terrifying, and many people don’t comprehend appropriate opioid use. When I first started taking pain medication, I remember a family member saying, “Dianne, you’re going to become an addict!”We need to help people understand that taking pain medicine to maximize one’s ability to be productive and to sustain enriching relationships is very different than the disease of addiction, which limits one’s ability to contribute to society and maintain healthy habits.

~ Dianne Bourque

Anyone who takes opioids on a regular basis will become dependent upon them, meaning they will have to taper off gradually to avoid withdrawal symptoms. But very few chronic pain patients exhibit the compulsive drug-seeking behaviors of someone who is addicted.

~ Karen Lee Richards

Several medical professional organizations acknowledge the utility of opioid therapy and many case series and large surveys report satisfactory reductions in pain, improvement in function and minimal risk of addiction.

~ Andrew Rosenblum

Despite what appears to be a low risk of addiction in naïve, chronic pain patients, it is reasonable to ask how much harm is actually done to patients with chronic pain by withholding opiate analgesics.

~ Howard L. Fields

I will be living with chronic pain for the rest of my life. I don’t have the mobility, energy or life options I used to have. I work hard to manage the pain, and I want the medical system to be a respectful and effective partner, not a jailer. The opioid crisis is not my doing.

~ Sonya Huber

Chronic pain patients like me are not the cause of the opioid crisis; only 22% of those who misuse opioids are prescribed them by a doctor, and only 13% of ER visits for opiate overdoses were chronic pain patients. Most chronic pain patients are rule-followers who just want to function.

~ Sonya Huber

When we are forced to endure what we cannot endure, something breaks inside our minds. That broken-mindedness is commonly called trauma.

~ John A. Macdougall

This is the part they don’t tell you about in the movies. Or in On the Road. This is not rock ’n’ roll. You are not William Burroughs, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if Kurt Cobain was slumped over in an alleyway in Seattle the day Bleach came out. There is no junkie chic. This is not Soho and you are not Sid Vicious. You are not a drugstore cowboy and you are not spotting trains. You are not a part of anything—no underground sect, no counter-culture movement, no music scene, nothing. You have just been released from jail and are walking down Mission Street, alternating between taking a hit off a cigarette and puking, looking for coins on the ground so you can catch a bus as you shit yourself.

~ Joe Clifford

Mom rubbed the back of my neck and we kept walking, away from the kids and the colors and the high-pitched, happy voices. Seeing them made me feel like I was a million miles from anything good. I just got really lonely. I'm not sure why. All those kids smiling and laughing and my mom so fucking clueless and me feeling kinda shitty and high at the same time. All of a sudden, I couldn't figure out what the point was. I couldn't remember what mattered.

~ Amy Sargent Swank

There’s a saying that goes something like: ‘We are all one drink or pill away from addiction,’ and I know this is meant to destigmatize what addicts go through, but I feel like I’ve been seeing variations on this ‘common knowledge’ more and more lately being used (on social media) as a cudgel to remind patients to not overdo it,” Anna says, speaking to the dual-edged sword of awareness. A motto designed to humanize the experience of addiction has been turned into a weapon that targets people who rely on opioids for pain management, and that translates to real-world stigma.

~ S. E. Smith

...the true test of the perversity of a pleasure is that it occupies a disproportionate amount of the attention.

~ Aleister Crowley

I take opioids to treat chronic pain. Stigmatizing them will harm me.

~ Sonya Huber

I think before I ever became an alcoholic, before I even tasted alcohol or tried drugs, I was already programmed to be this way. Before there was cocaine or vodka or sex or any of that, there was fantasy. There was escape. That was my first addiction. I remember being a little kid and imagining everything different, myself different. How did I get the idea in my head at age eight that everything was better somewhere else? Why would a child have a hole inside that can’t get full no matter what she does? The real world could never make me happy, so I retreated to the world inside my head. And as I grew, as the real world proved itself more and more painful, the fantasy world expanded.

~ Amy Reed

I don’t feel great, but I also don’t feel terrible, either, and I guess that’s how normal people feel most of the time. They live in the space between black and white, and their ups and downs are various shades of gray, not the extreme highs and lows I’ve always thought of as normal. I think that’s one of the major differences between us and them, between addicts and Normies. Somewhere along the line we got stuck on this roller coaster that only knows how to go to the highest up and the lowest low. We get high so we can feel invincible and perfect, but the feeling never lasts. Gravity always wins, and we fall fast, to a place lower and darker than many people will probably ever know. And the crazy thing is that this is just normal for us. We cycle through these extremes all the time, and it’s become as natural as breathing. Exhausting, but natural.

~ Amy Reed

The first week is the hardest. Then little by little the world opens up, and you realize there are all these people around you with their own needs that have nothing to do with you. Then you forget, and everything’s about you again. And maybe that cycle continues for the rest of your life. Maybe the world keeps expanding and contracting. Maybe you know you’re well when it finally stays the same size.

~ Amy Reed

I knew that I no longer wanted to take junk. If I could have made one decision, it would have been no more junk, ever, but when it came to the process of quitting I did not have the drive. It gave me a terrible feeling of helplessness to watch myself break every schedule I set up, as though I did not have control over my actions.

~ William S. Burroughs

Getting rid of the drugs doesn’t get rid of all the other ways you learned to deal with the world. It’s not that easy.

~ Amy Reed

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on [our Heavenly Father's] ground... It is His invention... He made the pleasures... All [Satan and his devils] can do is to encourage... humans to take the pleasures which our [God] has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence [they] always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for and ever diminishing pleasure is the formula... To get a man's soul and give him nothing in return - that is what really gladdens [the heart of Satan and his devils].

~ C.s. Lewis

Freedom doesn’t come through banning, freedom lies in mastering self-control.

~ Beem Weeks

Be addicted to your dream such that it becomes too difficult to wean you from it just like the way drug addicts finds it difficult to stop taking drugs.

~ Oscar Bimpong

I don't know what happened, but I do know this. It's not going anywhere. When you light up it waits for you to come down. You have to confront whatever's bothering you and look it straight in the eye. It's alright to forgive yourself, and it's okay to fight back, because if you don't kick the shit out of it, then it kicks you. It's a dog world, but you can control it, if you want to. A lot of people are going to try to make you feel like shit, but that doesn't mean you are. You are who you decide to be. I hope you're the kind of person that fights, because that's the only way to win.

~ E.m. Youman

You preach cleanliness,so I try to keep my room clean,but I feel no closer to God, and I guess that’s okaybecause he doesn’t knowwho he’s fucking with anyway.

~ Kris Kidd

A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out.

~ William S. Burroughs

Perhaps all pleasure in only relief

~ William S. Burroughs

They say you can’t build Rome in a day, but I’m pretty sure you could destroy it in even less.

~ Kris Kidd

A junkie runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junk time to start. A sick junkie has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait.

~ William S. Burroughs

Ah'm thinking about shoutin 'stop' but ah could never turn away at this point. If smack is as addictive as they say, then ah'm already aw the junky ah'm ever gaunny be.

~ Irvine Welsh

I had drunk myself to oblivion,Stepped from the room into a dreamless slumber,My consciousness had parted ways,Taking a well-earned vacation.

~ Morris R. Gates

No one is entitled to anything. Everything we get in this life we have worked for. And sometimes we take on baggage we never even signed up for, but that dosen't mean you deserve it. I wake up everyday wishing I could change things, but I can't change past. All I can do is change the future.

~ E.m. Youman

The answer to the drug problem is not criminalisation and incarceration, but education, regulation and treatment.

~ Merlyn Gabriel Miller

Lhyn watched her with a smile. “You do realize that’s your fourth cup and it’s not even midmeal. Shouldn’t you be starting a bit lower than full addict level?” “I am a full addict; what’s the use in pretending? Besides, it’s only three and a half cups.

~ Fletcher Delancey

As the uneasiness and... reluctance to face [his problems] cut him off more and more from all real happiness... habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo... All the healthy and outgoing activities [he shouldn't want to avoid] can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may... I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked. The Christians describe [Heavenly Father] as one without whom Nothing is strong. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in [dire] sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them... in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

~ C.s. Lewis

No one wants to be entrapped by his or her addictive habit...

~ Asa Don Brown

A book is open in front of me and this is what it has tosay about the symptoms of morphine withdrawal:'... morbid anxiety, a nervous depressed condition,irritability, weakening of the memory, occasionalhallucinations and a mild impairment of consciousness...'I have not experienced any hallucinations, but I canonly say that the rest of this description is dull, pedestrianand totally inadequate.'Depressed condition' indeed!Having suffered from this appalling malady, I hereby enjoinall doctors to be more compassionate toward theirpatients. What overtakes the addict deprived of morphinefor a mere hour or two is not a 'depressed condition': it isslow death. Air is insubstantial, gulping it down is useless... there is not a cell in one's body that does not crave... but crave what? This is something which defies analysisand explanation. In short, the individual ceases to exist:he is eliminated. The body which moves, agonises andsuffers is a corpse. It wants nothing, can think of nothingbut morphine. To die of thirst is a heavenly, blissful deathcompared with the craving for morphine. The feeling mustbe something like that of a man buried alive, clawing at theskin on his chest in the effort to catch the last tiny bubblesof air in his coffin, or of a heretic at the stake, groaning andwrithing as the first tongues of flame lick at his feet.Death. A dry, slow death. That is what lurks behindthat clinical, academic phrase 'a depressed condition'.

~ Mikhail Bulgakov