Recovery Quotes

Is a few hours of hell-raising, or respite from life's toil worth this every morning?

~ Catherine Lockwood

We all have scars; both inside and out. Use your experience to support those who are going down the same road of destruction you once went down. Know that your past is worth more than the pain you once carried, because it can now be used to comfort and give strength to another soul who is suffering. Cherish your trials and tribulations as gifts; embrace these opportunities to share the grace you have been given.

~ Katie Maslin

I have suffered pains and torture of all natures. I have heard many say, I am a survivor. I am not in a boat in a sea of torture awaiting to be rescued. I am a Conqueror, I am a Victor...I am one with myself.I AM FREE!

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

Sometimes the people around you won't understand your journey. They don't need to, it's not for them.

~ Joubert Botha

The fear of the drugs running out is manageable-the fear of time running down isn’t.

~ Ann Marlowe

Never has nostalgia held stronger sway, never has the belief in the redemptive possibilities of the future seemed so laughable.

~ Ann Marlowe

The fear of the drugs running out is managable-the fear of time running down isn't.

~ Ann Marlowe

At the lip of a cliff, I look out over Lake Superior, through the bare branches of birches and the snow-covered branches of aspens and pines. A hard wind blows snow up out of a cavern and over my face. I know this place, I know its seasons - I have hiked these mountains in the summer and walked these winding pathways in the explosion of colour that is a northern fall. And now, the temperature drops well below zero and the deadly cold lake rages below, I feel the stirrings of faith that here, in this place, in my heart, spring will come again.But first the winter must be waited out. And that waiting has worth.

~ Marya Hornbacher

It all made sense — terrible sense. The panic she had experienced in the warehouse district because of not knowing what had happened had been superseded at the newsstand by the even greater panic of partial knowledge. And now the torment of partly knowing had yielded to the infinitely greater terror of knowing precisely

~ Flora Rheta Schreiber

For example, I can doubt that 2 + 2 = 4; however, my doubting does not change the equation. When I test out that formula and find that it is true, then that becomes my reality. How can anything become real until it is tested in the crucible of doubt?

~ David W. Earle

Life is a funny thing. We claim it to be our own; but the truth is, it's not. It belongs to something much bigger. We, like everything else, are transient. This life is temporary and everything about us is temporary. What we call our life is nothing more than borrowed energy from something much bigger--nature, the universe, God--whatever floats your boat. And one day, when we pass, we will give that energy back to the world we borrowed it from in the first place.

~ Leanne Waters

When life beats us down, we often do not feel worthwhile to ourselves nor to anyone else. Often, we try to hide our feelings of inadequacy in pursuit of perfection, which develops into self-loathing. If only we can be perfect, then we can be okay.

~ David W. Earle

When I realized that my body had been damaged from adverse environmental exposures, I decided to use it for medical research and to develop the recovery techniques.

~ Steven Magee

My recovery from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) was based around radiation detoxification, restoring the DC voltage of the body and removing the clots.

~ Steven Magee

She went weak in the knees and could barely walk as she followed him, trembling with fear. Her hopes for a happy future with Jordan came crashing down. Whoever had told Jordan she was free to travel under the name of Maria Brooks must have misled him.

~ Dianne Harman Cornered Coyote

They sought the pain they knew so well and called it love.

~ David W. Earle

Guilt is a destructive and ultimately pointless emotion

~ Lynn Crilly

My mother is a certainty. I can count on the watercolour pain in her voice when she calls to say she hasn't heard from me in months. The precarious laughter as she comes from the kitchen, when I finally do appear on her doorstep, the laughter that says I might be a chickadee that's alighted unexpectedly on her thumb.

~ Trevor Cole

Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out.

~ David Foster Wallace

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

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

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

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

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

~ Kris Kidd

Be aware of your addiction to the addicted.

~ Jennifer Ho-Dougatz

I have never heard of an electromagnetically hypersensitive person recovering from the condition using shielding and Faraday cages, they just seem to become social lepers due to their increasing reactivity to the city environment and addicts to their shielded environment.

~ Steven Magee

Life isn't like a Full House episode. There isn't going to be an easy out to every conflict. There is no milkman, paperboy, or evening TV. There are good moments and bad moments and not everything will tie together nicely in the end. But that's life, and I think I'm finally starting to get it.

~ Jodie Sweetin

We, as a society, have arbitrarily differentiated between acceptable and unacceptable drug addictions.

~ Steven Kassels

Once upon a time the future was supposed to be brighter, shinier and more fun. When did that vision pass? When did the word 'new' lose it's luster? Now the past is supposed to hold the hopes we once confided to the future. We're directing attachments that used to go forward backward.

~ Ann Marlowe

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

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

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

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

Getting sober is a radically creative act.

~ Meredith Bell

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

Always love, always encourage, and never let despair get in the way.

~ Super Star

Often self-love is replaced with self- loathing, compounded by beating ourselves up. We become experts at putting ourselves down, judging ourselves, and finding fault. This creates deep shame that says “I am a mistake” instead of saying “I made a mistake.

~ David W. Earle