c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
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, Being Sober and Becoming Happy: The Best Ideas from the Director of Spiritual Guidance at Hazelden
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, Junkie Love
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, Seven Birds
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, Diary of a Drug Fiend
I take opioids to treat chronic pain. Stigmatizing them will harm me.
— Sonya Huber
Note: addiction diverts attention
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
In a very real way, attention is a drug. Like dope, attention makes people feel good by delivering a ‘’hit’’ of certain neurotransmitters (chemicals that transmit, or block the transmission of electrochemical currents) in the brain. Like anything that does this (viz., sex, risk-taking, power), in excessive amounts it’s addictive. And, simply because it works, nothing is as addictive as a pain killer. Hence Narcissus is well-named from the Greek word for narcosis.Attention is his pain killer.
— Kathy Krajco, What Makes Narcissists Tick: Understanding Narcissistic Personality Disorder
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, Clean
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, Clean
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, Clean
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, Junky
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, Clean
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, The Screwtape Letters
Freedom doesn’t come through banning
—  freedom lies in mastering self-control.
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, The Prince's Plan
The insane rush of endorphins that flooded my system the moment my phone vibrated and her name popped up on screen was worrying. I'd never been addicted to anything before, but I thought maybe this is what it felt like to be a junkie in desperate need of a hit. "Edward Cullen, you poor, miserable bastard," I said as I locked my phone screen and stared at the ceiling. "I should not have judged you so harshly.
— Krystal Sutherland, Our Chemical Hearts
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, Down for Whatever
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, Junky
Perhaps all pleasure in only relief
— William S. Burroughs, Junky
They say you can’t build Rome in a day, but I’m pretty sure you could destroy it in even less.
— Kris Kidd, Down for Whatever
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, Junky
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, Skagboys
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 Prince's Plan
The answer to the drug problem is not criminalisation and incarceration, but education, regulation and treatment.
— Merlyn Gabriel Miller, Sex, Death, Drugs & Madness
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, Catalyst
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, The Screwtape Letters
No one wants to be entrapped by his or her addictive habit...
— Asa Don Brown
I don't have to live that way anymore
— Kn
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, Morphine
Addiction by any other name is love.
— Shannon L. Alder
The lack of culpability of the perpetrator and his or her transference of blame onto alcohol or other substances only perpetuates the violent behaviors.
— Asa Don Brown
Addiction is just a little hiding place where sensitive people can go so we don't have to be touched by love or pain.
— Glennon Doyle Melton
Be your best proponent, ally, and advocate.
— Asa Don Brown
It is essential that children who are directly or indirectly affected by domestic violence receive psychological care.
— Asa Don Brown
Addiction is not shameful. It is a disease.
— Raju Mangrola, MD
You know, Michael,” Pastor Charles would often tell him, “some men get high on drugs and make a mess while they are high; others get drunk and behave like animals while under the influence of alcohol; and you Michael, you fall in love and lose any sense of reality. It is the same like getting high. You are an addict too. You are addicted to women. But not in the perverted pornographic or sexual way. Sex is just a part of it. Your addiction is more about love. You are addicted to falling in love. And the only remedy for your addiction is the ultimate love; love of God and love for God. Turn to God Michael. He loves you. Show your love for him and you will be healed.
— Stevan V. Nikolic, Truth According to Michael
In our twenty first century social media world, people are so eager to have likes from friend on social media for what they do; their writings, images and videos but they are not so eager to have they like of God for what they do or refuse to do!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Things you don't need in your life targets you the most.
— Michael Bassey Johnson, Master of Maxims
The life of the Addict is always the same. There is no excitement, no glamour, no fun. There are no good times, there is no joy, there is no happiness. There is no future and no escape. There is only an obsession. An all-encompassing, fully enveloping, completely overwhelming obsession. To make light of it, brag about it, or revel in the mock glory of it is not in any way, shape or form related to its truth, and that is all that matters, the truth.
— James Frey, A Million Little Pieces
I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means of increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.
— William S. Burroughs
She screwed me for life," he lamented to the pretty young woman he desperately wanted to love but couldn't quite fall in love with. "I've had relationships before but she was the most peculiar, infuriating and damnable thing I ever dared care for!" "You want to forget her," his girlfriend said painfully. She rubbed his back wishing she didn't have to compete with a menacing memory. "That relationship, the strangest I've ever known, changed me," he confided regretfully. "Like an unwanted and destructive addiction." "She wronged you," the red-head beside him blurted out truthfully. "And she continues to wrong you because you let her. Ever since her you can't help but compare." He looked at her tenderly, his heart trying to break through ice. "You want to let go but you can't let go," she continued coolly. He looked into the distance feeling the one he drew close but seeing the one out of reach. How could he let go of something, or someone, that made him feel so alive? A sweet, supportive voice knowingly broke through his thoughts, "The challenge," she whispered, "lies within you...
— Donna Lynn Hope
I felt utterly stripped of safety and love. And so, what tormented me most as I shook through August of 1988 wasn’t the nausea and chills but the recurring fear that I’d never have lasting comfort or joy again.
— Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction
I could understand why some fella’s take drugs just before their crimes: because they need something to help them quiet their minds. However, I don’t do drugs nor do I drink alcohol, but the thing that gets me high like a kite is a crime well done. Then there’s the scent of freshly fired gunpowder, or the sounds of the empty bullet casings hitting the ground as they are ejected each time I pull the trigger. These two things never fail to get me high; the truth is I’m seriously addicted to violence.
— Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
Adiction to reading....There are worse things in the world to be Addicted to.
— Christy Mair
Back in those days I was stoned almost twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The difference today is that there is nothing you or anyone else could say to persuade me to inhale enough even to fill a flea’s lung with cannabis. It’s actually impossible to measure how fantastic I feel.
— Chris Sullivan, The Joy of Quitting Cannabis: Freedom From Marijuana
In people like us, the craving is as strong as the craving for food or water, the yearning for touch or light or love. I was looking for something--a diversion, an occupation, an unwavering force--that would elevate me, that would lift me out of the melancholy dissection of my own interior geography that otherwise would have consumed me pitilessly, as it had my father. I wanted to fly above myself-- if only for a few hours--and look down in tranquility upon my life.
— Ethan Canin, A Doubter's Almanac
The Karpman drama triangle is a classic model of codependent behaviour. First of all, a codependent will rescue someone. Then, when their ‘brave and charitable’ work hasn’t been acknowledged, they become very angry at the person they have attempted to rescue. And finally, they start to feel like a victim. They feel sorry for themselves and complain how the person they rescued never appreciated them. The important thing to learn here is that if a person wants to change, it’s because they have made a decision to do so.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
It was only when I started to reconnect with my inner child four years into recovery (I was over four years clean and sober off drugs and alcohol) and started to attend a love addiction support group that I was able to trust again and have faith that there are just as many honest and trustworthy women as there are women who are not interested in monogamy. However, it was after ten years of continuous recovery that I started to really dig deep into my childhood grief work and was finally able to reclaim my inner child. I started to take risks again. On a practical level, you can’t get very far in this world if you resent and distrust the opposite sex and, sadly, many men and women suffer in this area. Rather than celebrating the opposite sex, they fear them. Empathy and self-compassion has helped me in this area too.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
Trying their wings once more in hopeless flight: Blind moths against the wires of window screens. Anything. Anything for a fix of light.  X. J. Kennedy, "Street Moths," The Lords of Misrule
— X.J. Kennedy, The Lords of Misrule: Poems 1992–2001
Isms’ are described as transference of addictive patterns of dysfunctional behaviour, passed down from generation to generation. For instance, if a mother was an alcoholic who never made it into recovery, her behaviour would leave a mark on her children, husband, etc. Unless her adult children join some sort of recovery programme and adopt the mindfulness practice, they will have very similar behaviour traits to their mother but minus the alcohol abuse. There is a strong possibility that they will become codependent and form relationships with other codependents or alcoholics.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
Healthy and non-shaming mirroring is an important part of the process. We can gain this from a highly emotionally intelligent and effective peer group that has our best interests at heart.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
A sex addict is also emotionally anorexic – they must be in order to continue participating in isolated behaviour such as being addicted to pornography and being promiscuous or having multiple affairs. All of these secretive behaviour patterns affect a family and home.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
Love addicts often pick partners who are emotionally unavailable because deep down, they don’t feel worthy of having a healthy, loving relationship. A love addict craves and obsesses about becoming enmeshed or ‘one’ with another human being at all costs, even if it means putting themselves in potential danger.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
Think of an untreated sex addict who spends hours every night until the early hours watching pornography on the internet instead of spending that time with their wife or husband, and then becomes so tired due to the late nights that their professional life suffers. The sex addict’s behaviour will cause resentment, destroy trust and create economic insecurities in the family and home.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
It’s important to be aware that many families are dysfunctional, but we can change the patterns. Even if a child grew up in an aggressive or addictive household, they can heal and move past that with immense emotional resilience, wisdom and gratitude. This is what recovery can offer anyone who, like you, is open-minded, willing and ready to explore self-awareness and take action.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
Mental stories can literally spoil a human life. It took me a long time to become aware of my mental commentary, such as: “Everything always goes wrong”, “I won’t be accepted”, “I’m a failure” or “What’s the point?” Those fears were deep-rooted and triggered many upsetting addictive patterns of behaviour
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
In the addiction recovery community, we recognise that addicts can starve themselves of receiving social, sexual or emotional nourishment. Sex and love addicts starve themselves of a healthy, personal relationship and, consequently, deliberately avoid wholesome relationships with other human beings. We’re getting quite deep now, but there are many papers and books published on sexual and emotional anorexia. I have also suffered from emotional anorexia. It’s no myth!
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
When we seek to escape from inner conflict and pain, we are running away from unresolved childhood trauma or original pain. Most people with serious addictive natures who are in the process of recovery have found that trauma played a huge role in escalating their addictions. It certainly did for me.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
Top lines to a human being who tends to isolate (an avoidant) would mean they make an effort to talk to another human being when the opportunity arises. A top line can also mean that, whether we feel like it or not, we are committed to our recovery and to improving our emotional and professional life. The idea of ‘top lines’ is not to be hard on ourselves or to put us in a position where we feel unsafe or burnt out. It’s a way to avoid missing opportunities to learn, serve and grow.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
Bottom lines are addictive behaviours that we make a conscious choice not to repeat. For example, a recovering cocaine addict would create a bottom line that they will not use a mind- or mood-altering substance to deliberately get high. A recovering sex addict might create a bottom line not to watch pornography or not to have sex without any emotional or spiritual connection. Bottom lines are a symbol of our intentions and are very useful at a practical level to address addictions. In many recovery communities, twelve-step fellowships and addiction rehabs, there is also a concept called ‘top lines’.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
He was a black hole to anyone who might imagine that he or she was a friend of his.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Addiction is pretty simple. It's what happens when peolme don't get what they need, and end up soothing themselves.
— Gabor Maté
I don’t think I’ve ever met an addict in long-term recovery who hasn’t gone through at least one traumatic childhood experience. Research indicates that one traumatic event in childhood is as grave as continuous combat in a war zone. A traumatic event during childhood can leave a grave imprint on the human body.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
I grew up being told, "If you do marijuana you'll be a slave for the rest of your life," and it only took me ten minutes to realize smoking marijuana was pretty cool. Then it was, "If you take LSD you'll be a slave for the rest of your life. Then it got to be, "If you take cocaine, you'll be slave for life." There was a time when I thought, "Hey, I've been taking Heroin for six months and I feel fine. You know, just on weekends." I actually believed that you didn't have to become addicted. I was wrong. The most important thing out of this is, don't lie to the kids. If marijuana is not going to make you homeless and addicted, don't tell people it is, because they'll found out it doesn't, then when they get to the stuff that really WILL, they ain't gonna believe you." - Dickie Peterson
— Jon Wiederhorn, Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal
Only he who is free with his time is free with his opinion.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
I wanted it for how it made me feel, regardless of how little it cared for me. Do whatever you want -- just give me the bliss.
— C.M. McKenna
And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
I used to condemn junkies, like they could get off the stuff if they really wanted to, and that is just as stupid as saying, "You could grow eyes in the back of your head if you really wanted to.
— Philip K. Dick, Philip K. Dick: The Last Interview and Other Conversations
I have two quizzes tomorrow. I am playing Pokemon in a bar while high on heroin.
— Morbo2000, Tracks: Volume 1
Quit while you’re ahead.All the best gamblers do.
— Baltasar Gracián Y Morales
Addiction makes love impossible.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
Tragically, because many addicts are not given sufficient love, nurturing and non-shaming dialogue at crucial stages in their early emotional development, they are on a quest to find contentment from a source outside of themselves. Their parents might have provided bountifully for them; however, their parents were never fully emotionally present while parenting, which made their children feel starved of emotional nourishment.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
Some addicts do not even have basic parenting and instead are beaten, sexually abused, left to be looked after by a dysfunctional ‘carer’, put in orphan homes or rejected by their community. If you calculate the millions of emotionally neglected children and observe them growing up together trying to ‘get by in life’, you will understand why many adults (adult children) have addictive personalities.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
Regardless of the different stages in our human development, unless we learn how to create loving and fulfilling relationships (with ourselves and others), addiction will follow – not necessarily as a manifestation of substance misuse but in the form of codependence, compulsive thinking, unhealthy relationships, sex and love addictions, overeating, insidious incarnations of self-harm and so on.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
Scores of high-powered men and women are addicted to substances or destructive addictive patterns of behaviour. As a matter of fact, it is easier to hide one’s addiction while maintaining a high-powered position compared to the addicts and alcoholics we see sleeping on street corners.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
Drug and alcohol addiction almost killed me. I was a grave substance misuser in my teens. I started drinking at ten, smoking at eleven and by the time I attended high school aged twelve, I was regularly smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol on weekends. I was a full-blown alcoholic at thirteen. Tragically, I had my stomach pumped at fourteen and although I promised my family I would never drink again, I started less than two weeks later. I was completely hooked on alcohol.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
If we are continuing to attract partners that are emotionally unavailable, then it’s essential that we observe our own addictive patterns rather than focusing on theirs.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
Be aware of your addiction to the addicted.
— Jennifer Ho-Dougatz
Vassily cleared his throat, probably impatient with Gabriel's bookshelf manners. 'You'll have to excuse me,' Gabriel said, putting back the booklet, 'I have a severe addiction to ink.''Don't we all?' Vassily nodded. 'Thank God we have other addictions to assuage it a little.
— Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos
I would start with four fingers of Jack in a thick mug, with a sweating Budweiser back, and by midnight I would be alone at the end of the bar, armed, drunk, and hunched over my glass, morally and psychologically insane.
— James Lee Burke, Light of the World
Fee-fi-fo-fum, now I'm borrowed, now I'm numb.
— Anne Sexton, Selected Poems
In a way, being an addict is very proactive. A good addiction takes the guesswork out of death. There is such a thing as planning your getaway.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
A chatWith the Grim Reapershould be enough to scareaway any thought of relapse.Wish it were that easy,but not even days conversingwith death can disintegratethe claws of addiction.
— Ellen Hopkins, Traffick
Drink a bottle of cheap champagne. Mix with orange juice. A large Glenmorangie. Milk and blackish toast. Half a bottle of Blue Nun. Budweiser. Budweiser. Go to church. Say I do etc. Budweiser. Murphy’s. Jameson. Budweiser. Stella. Stella. Cake. Stella. Jameson. Stella. Vodka and orange. Vodka and black. Speech, speech. Vodka. Vodka. Double Jameson. Double vodka. Double vodka. Get carry-outs of barley wine. Say goodbye to aunties. Uncles. Mothers etc. Stop car on M18. Vomit. Sleep. Dream of dim-lit hallways and a black door. Wake up between Scarborough and Robin Hood’s Bay. Her not saying much. Driving.
— Dean Lilleyman, Billy and the Devil
Bodies need poison. Withdrawals without it. Toxin-free airs a killer.
— Hubert Selby Jr., Waiting Period
The War on Drugs, from the Hastings-facing window of the PortlandHotel, is manifested in the pregnant Celia kneeling on the sidewalk,handcuffed wrists behind her back, eyes cast on the ground. Therewas no Detective-Sergeant Gillespie to protect her when, as a littlegirl, she was raped by her stepfather and subjected to the nocturnalspitting ritual, so in the War on Drugs she has become one of theenemy.
— Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
[Texting] discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of detail. And the addictive problems are compounded by texting's hyperimmediacy. E-mails take some time to work their way through the Internet, through switches and routers and servers, and they require that you take the step of explicitly opening them. Text messages magically appear on the screen of your phone and demand immediate attention from you. Add to that the social expectation that an unanswered text feels insulting to the sender, and you've got a recipe for addiction: You receive a text, and that activates your novelty centers. You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you fifteen seconds earlier). Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine as your limbic system cries out "More! More! Give me more!
— Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
Find What You love And Let it kill You.
— Mohammed Wazeem
That night, I dream. And when I wake up I remember watching a film with Nannan about a ventriloquist who went mad, his dummy coming to life and speaking for itself. My dream is like the end of the film where the ventriloquist and the dummy are in the madhouse, all these mad devil-faces pressed against the iron bars of the cell door, laughing as the dummy gets up off his chair and walks towards the ventriloquist who screams. The dummy strangles him. I can’t remember in the dream if I was the ventriloquist or the dummy. I’m in a funny mood all day. I don’t say much. I don’t feel like it.
— Dean Lilleyman, Billy and the Devil
It hurts so bad that I cannot save him, protect him, keep him out of harm's way, shield him from pain. What good are fathers if not for these things?
— Thomas Lynch
In this cell you are small. They’ve taken your belt and your shoelaces. You break a little. You put your hands over your face so they don’t see. They don’t listen when you shout for water, Please. Your tongue is so dry it feels too big for your mouth. You don’t sleep. Someone behind the door shouts BASTARDS BASTARDS. You think you can see an old man crouched and watching you in that dark corner over there. You try and make spit to drink but you can’t. In the morning they give you half a plastic cup of warm water. Across your tongue they drag a cotton bud which they drop into a plastic bag with your name on it. They take your fingerprints, your photograph, and then when you get home, she tells you she’s pregnant.
— Dean Lilleyman, Billy and the Devil
She gave a shiver, and suddenly clutched her arms about her body. She spoke, Gascoigne thought, with an exhilarated fatigue, the kind that comes after the first blush of love, when the self has lost its mooring, and, half-drowning, succumbs to a fearful tide. But addiction was not love; it could not be love. Gascoigne could not romanticize the purple shadows underneath her eyes, her wasted limbs, the dreamy disorientation with which she spoke; but even so, he thought, it was uncanny that opium's ruin could mirror love's raptures with such fidelity.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
Is it the smoke?' the boy said, shivering slightly. 'I've never touched the stuff, myself, but how it claws at one...like a thorn in every one of your fingers, and a string around your heart...and one fees it always. Nagging. Nagging.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
When speculators have once entered Wall Street, they never leave it except in a pine box or a rosewood case, according to circumstances.
— H.W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900
It's probably weird to think about an addiction like it's a sentient being, but that's how it feels. Like it's something living inside you. Something you can't get rid of because killing it means killing you. I can't really understand addictions to drugs or alcohol. Things that control you. But an eating disorder is an addiction you control. Wait, is that paradoxical? I prefer to believe not.
— Ellen Hopkins, Identical
I had two speeds, which often varied with my blood alcohol level: fine with whatever, and never, ever satisfied. Where was the balance between these two?
— Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget
I can’t imagine what other people think cold turkey is like. It is fucking awful. On the scale of things, it’s better than having your leg blown off in the trenches. It’s better than starving to death. But you don’t want to go there. The whole body just sort of turns itself inside out and rejects itself for three days. You know in three days it’s going to calm down. It’s going to be the longest three days you’ve spent in your life, and you wonder why you’re doing this to yourself when you could be living a perfectly normal fucking rich rock star life. And there you are puking and climbing walls. Why do you do that to yourself? I don’t know. I still don’t know. Your skin crawling, your guts churning, you can’t stop your limbs from jerking and moving about, and you’re throwing up and shitting at the same time, and shit’s coming out your nose and your eyes, and the first time that happens for real, that’s when a reasonable man says, “I’m hooked.” But even that doesn’t stop a reasonable man from going back on it.
— Keith Richards, Life
Don’t let the situation say stop to your true purpose
— say stop to the situation. Situations are situations and you are you
What the hell is that?" he asked."Magic mushrooms.""I've always wanted to try those," he exclaimed. "They sound so cute.
— Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals
It wasn't fair that my friends could stay at Captain Morgan's pirate ship party while I was drop-kicked into a basement with homeless people chanting the Serenity Prayer.
— Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget
I believe that a person's thoughts often manifest into actual events - that we think things into existence. Right? Well, think about this: one of the illnesses that has become an epidemic in the Western world is an addiction to news. Newspapers, Internet news, 24-hour news channels. And what is news? News is history in the making. So the addiction to news is the addiction to the outcome of history. Are you with me so far?''I get it. Go on.''In the past couple of decades, news has been produced as entertainment. So people's addiction to news is the addiction to its function as entertainment. If you combine the power of thought with this addiction to entertaining news, then the part of the hundreds of millions of people, the viewing public, that wishes peace on earth is overshadowed by the part of them that wants the next chapter in the story. Every person who turns on the news and finds there's no developments is disappointed. They're checking the news two or three times a day - they want drama, and drama means not only death but death by the thousands, so in the secrets parts of themselves, every news-addicted person is hoping for greater calamity, more bodies, more spectacular wars, more hideous enemy attacks, and these wishes are going out every day into the world. Don't you see? Right now, more than at any other time in history, the universal wish is a black one.
— Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole
Temptation can sway even the purest mind to sin, and the denialist to claim that tomorrow will bring change. However, the irrefutable truth is—tomorrow, my friend, never comes.
— Jason Worthley, The Haunting of Salem Wood
And when a man that old takes up money-hunting, it's like when he takes up gambling or whisky or women. He aint going to have time to quit.
— William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses
I had this great idea: I should get a job. Freelancing came with freedom, but maybe what I required was a cage.
— Sarah Hepola
Idolatry is always subject to the law of diminishing returns.
— Elyse M. Fitzpatrick, Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus
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, Curing Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity
But I know that in my heart of hearts that drinking is about as good an escape as an innocent game of suicide skiing, so I know also that David's complete obsession with video games of this type, or any type, are far from healthy.
— Sarabeth Purcell
This year he'd been caught up in a whirlwind called Jaenelle Angelline-as impossible to deflect as she was to stop-and he had become an accomplice in all sorts of schemes that, even in their innocence, had been thrilling
— Anne Bishop
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
As often is the case with addictions, the fanciful notion of a gradual discontinuance only provided a comforting pretext for more sustained indulgence.
— Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton
Alcoholism is above all a disease of denial.
— David Stafford
We, as a society, have arbitrarily differentiated between acceptable and unacceptable drug addictions.
— Steven Kassels
A selfie is a proof that either we are very lonely or too self absorbed to ask others to take our picture.
— Saru Singhal
Love is the purest religion and the most destructive addiction!
— Yahia Kareem
I, the unfortunate Doctor Polyakov, who became addicted to morphine in February of this year, warn anyone who may suffer the same fate not to attempt to replace morphine with cocaine. Cocaine is a most foul and insidious poison. Yesterday Anna barely managed to revive me with camphor injections and today I am half dead.
— Mikhail Bulgakov, Morphine
Always she had sounded sympathetic, always she had appeared to understand. But inside there was a bit of her that said that they couldn't have tried hard enough. If Celia had a daughter who was desperately unhappy at school and who had lost four stone in weight, she wouldn't hang around --she'd try to cope with it. If she had a father who couldn't cope she'd have him to live with her. Only now was she beginning to realize that it was not to be so simple. People had minds of their own. And her mother's mind was like a hermetically sealed box in a vault of a bank.
— Maeve Binchy, The Lilac Bus
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
Life is an addiction Wind to feel ,Love to crave ,Power to have ,Cigarette's to smoke.
— Aditya.Pawar
Dependence on drugs is not a disease, it is not a virus, it is not something that stalks only the dregs of society. Drug addiction is REALIZED EMOTIONAL DEFICIENCY SYNDROME.
— Plamen Chetelyazov, Flaws of Oblivion
Most people are dependent on legal drugs but this is somehow not an obstacle to seeing an enemy in every underground addict.
— Plamen Chetelyazov, Flaws of Oblivion
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, Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America
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, The Light Bearer
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, Revival
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, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
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, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
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 Alcoholism and Addiction Cure
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, The Color Master: Stories