Addiction Quotes

For him (LBJ) food was not an indulgence but and intoxicant, an object he reached for to fill a gaping void, one he could never fill up.

~ Jonathan Darman

Books are worse than wine, I say. You read one and you need another - there's no end to it. What ails you that you cannot content yourself with just living on under the sun?

~ Donna Gillespie

This is how we bring about our own damnation, you know-by ignoring the voice that begs us to stop. To stop while there's still time.

~ Stephen King

What they don't tell you when you get sober is that if you manage to stay that way, you will bury your friends. Not everyone gets to have a whole new shiny-but-messy life like I have, and I've never come up with a satisfying explanation for why that is.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

Denial makes it easier to keep an addiction progressing smoothly along and, being a lie, it’s just better form.

~ Geoffrey Wood

It isn't drugs addicts have to give up. It's misery.

~ Marty Rubin

The battle for self-control over an intense undesired habit consists of an endless series of skirmishes, in which our urges and our better angels clash several times each day.

~ Matthew D Lieberman

With addiction, a client’s fears can be ripened into some very pleasing fruit: Irritability, suspiciousness, isolation, paranoia, and finally on to that grand banana —the fear of Fear itself.

~ Geoffrey Wood

The trick here is, while the actual pleasure begins to recede and blur, we simultaneously bring the imagined pleasure more fully into focus. And when we do, even the memory of the pleasure becomes more and more heightened and imagined, thus anticipation is increased. This kind of anticipation is the spiritual equivalent of a Cheeto and we want them to eat the whole bag.

~ Geoffrey Wood

If we must tempt to Pleasure, how do we tempt to the least amount of Pleasure? Or better yet, tempt them to its opposite? But how to tempt them to pain.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Do we? Our problem is whatever wedges between us and God.

~ Toni Sorenson

Well, I totally understand why people take huge drugs. Like heroin, or cocaine. I can understand why you would want to be literally out of your own head, because being in your own head is unbearable. In fact, the reason I haven't taken drugs like that is because I know that it would be so good to be out of my own head that I wouldn't be able to stop

~ Alyssa Brugman

An imagined pleasure is never really the pleasure, but an imagined pain, in a very real sense, is the pain, because so much of pain is the consciousness of it. It makes itself objective. Whereas to think about pleasure is to step outside of it; to think about a presently felt pain is to step inside it. And in a very real sense, we’ve already got them in Hell.

~ Geoffrey Wood

And so, wish becomes pang; the crave, an ache; pleasure, pain. Losing all its pleasure, anticipation cuts the opposite direction and becomes merely a constant, painful reminder of what they’ve lost, forever.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Some people are so addicted to their misery that they will destroy anything that gets in the way of their fix.

~ Bryant Mcgill

When people who believe themselves to be addicts or alcoholics come under great stress or trauma, they mentally give themselves permission to drink or use drugs as a remedy.

~ Chris Prentiss

The phone is about the same size as a cigarette pack. It's no surprise to me that the traditional cigarette lighter in many cars has turned into the space we use to recharge our phones. They are kin. The phone, like the cigarette, let's the texter/former smoker drop out of any social interaction for a second to get a break and make a little love to the beautiful object. We need something, people. We can't live propless.

~ Aimee Bender

Some, they didn't make it.The temptation just too strong.How can darkness cloud the mindTo what I know as wrong?

~ Kimberly Nalen

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

I was at this guy's house. I met this girl who was hanging out there. She was real pretty, she had brown eyes and dark hair. She was soft-spoken and real nice. I know that everyone has their own life and they can do what they want and you shouldn't think anything of it or anything. But man, I couldn't help but flinch a little when I saw all those needle marks in her arm, they looked so sore. Hateful little holes. I wanted to say something, but I didn't.

~ Henry Rollins

Alcohol and drugs are not the problems; they are what people are using to help themselves cope with the problems. Those problems always have both physical and psychological components- anything from anemia, hypoglycemia, or a sluggish thyroid to attention deficient disorder, brain-wave pattern imbalances, or deep emotional pain.

~ Chris Prentiss

I am not addicted to coffee, it find it's way every morning.

~ Pushpa Rana

I recovered from recovering so no longer celebrate not doing bad things to defend myself as good. I added new bad for good measure.

~ Brian Spellman

And, sure, fine, I do check my phone about every two minutes, but so do a lot of people, and it's better than smoking, that's what I say. It's the new, lung-safe cigarette.

~ Aimee Bender

Even if we're among the lucky few who benefit from civilization, we find ourselves curiously unsatisfied, plagued by stress, worry, and conflict... Like the addict who believes against all evidence that what he can't give up won't lead to suffering and death, our culture adheres to its ideas in spite of ample, clear evidence they will lead to suffering and death.

~ Michael Carter

When nothing else worked, we created a holistic, hand-tailored program that saved Pax's life. At Passages, he and I use what we learned in curing him to help others discover the roots of their addiction or alcoholism and break free.

~ Chris Prentiss

There are a lot of times the heart burrows deeper, goes tunnelling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know.They are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation. There is a bareness that spreads out over the interior landscape of the self, a bareness like tundra, with no sign of life in any direction, no sign of anything beneath the frozen crust of ground, no sign that spring ever intends to come again.

~ Marya Hornbacher

I began asking myself just what my high was about. What did I do when I was high that I didn't do when I was sober? What was wrong that heroin fixed?

~ Pax Prentiss

When was the last time you woke up and wished you'd had just one more drink the night before?I have never regretted not drinking. Say this to yourself, and you'll get through anything.

~ Meredith Bell

If you can stop using substance or stop your addictive behavior for extended periods of time without craving, you are not dependent. You are dependent only if you can't stop without physical or psychological distress (you have unpleasant physical and/or psychological withdrawal symptoms) or if you stop and then relapse.

~ Chris Prentiss

Getting sober is a radically creative act.

~ Meredith Bell

Heroin was a coping mechanism that I had used to deal with my underlying fears. They were the real problems; heroin wasn't the culprit, my fears were.

~ Pax Prentiss

At times it may seem worse - harder, at least - to live through the despair of this loss without the temporary comfort of our addictive behaviour. We cannot drown our sorrows. We must face the fact that we don’t know, really, where we are, how we got here, how long the pain will last, or how to move past it. That uncertainty may be the most painful part of not knowing a God: no one is there to reassure us that a God will take the pain and confusion away. We simply don’t know. And we have no way to numb ourselves or to forget the condition we’re in.

~ Marya Hornbacher

I spent the rest of that day and most of the night thinking about all the hundreds of people I had met in rehabs and sober living houses and on the streets. We were all medicating our fears and our pain!

~ Pax Prentiss

From food addiction to food serenity - freedom tastes great!

~ Vera Tarman

Theirs was a tug-of-war and neither could let go. Both felt the burn and still wouldn't let go. Some might call it a game for neither could admit defeat.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

Remember what I used to tel you when you were a little girl? ‘A fool and her money soon part.’ Current-day translation? Stop pissing away your assets at Bloomingdale’s.

~ Sophie Kinsella

The advertise their products in such a fashion as to make it seem wonderful to drink their ethanol products. It does not matter if they give their products fancy name like Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Noir, or if they put bubbles in an ethanol product and call it champagne or beer- everyone is selling ethanol.

~ Chris Prentiss

If those underlying conditions aren't treated, the return of those symptoms may cause us so much discomfort that we'll go back to using addictive drugs or alcohol to obtain relief. That's the primary reason there is such a high rate of relapse among people who have become dependent of alcohol and addictive drugs. It has little to do with alcohol and addiction themselves and almost everything to do with the original causes that created the dependency.

~ Chris Prentiss

Even those who drink until blacking out, those who beat women, are not the exception, hopefully not the norm, trapped somewhere in society in a dark place nobody wants to talk about.

~ Justin Donner