Alcoholic Quotes

“Drunkards have a problem, not with sobriety, but with reality.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I am a drunk.
It took me some time to know this.
Here is how I know. How it’s always been is I don’t know how to talk or move or sleep or shit. I wake up mornings with my head in a vice. The only solution is to drink again. That makes me almost jolly. It does wonders in the morning to take my mind off the pain and pressure. I can use my eyes after the first drink, I remember how to line up my feet and walk, loosen my jaw, tell someone to get out of my way. Then I get tired. I whine and need to lie down. I lie down, I want a drink. I cannot sleep without having already forgotten my name, my face, my life. If I were to sit still or lie down in a room with some memory of myself – the time I have left to live out, that nasty sentence, that hell – I would go mad.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, McGlue

“Addiction denied is recovery delayed.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“He had, he verily believed, overcome all tendency to fly to liquor - which, indeed, he had never done from taste, but merely as an escape from intolerable misery of the mind.”
― Thomas Hardy

“You can never replace it. The good news is you do learn to live without it. You miss it. You want it. You hang out with a bunch of other crazy people who feel the same way and you live with it. And eventually, you start to sound like a cloying self-help book, like me.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Dry

“We had dry martinis; great wing-shaped glasses of perfumed fire, tangy as the early morning air.”
― Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

“I'm just an alcoholic who became a writer so that I would be able to stay in bed until noon.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“If you're one of us, the bottle takes your shit, that's all. First a little, then a lot, then everything.”
― Stephen King, Doctor Sleep

“Beer. There’s nothing I don’t like about it. I love the smell, the taste—even the sound of it. The cool thunk of the cap coming off the bottle, the silvery crack of the pop-top can. You need to sip a whiskey. And I was never a sipper. I was a guzzler. I loved the feeling of it: to open wide the mouth of the soul and pour a cold one down my throat, with my mind racing ever-forward toward the next. Beer was kind and faithful, like an old friend. Every drinker has their poison. I am a beer man.”
― Tod A, Banging the Monkey

“Alcohol is some people’s pillar of weakness.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I spent so much time at “rock bottom” that I was charged rent for staying there.”
― D.C. Hyden, The Sober Addict

“Slavery often masquerades as freedom.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, P for Pessimism: A Collection of Funny yet Profound Aphorisms

“Alcoholics drown in a sea of wine.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Not a single alcohol has a human problem.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“It almost never takes a pleasant state of mind to desire to be high or drunk.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Some of our endeavours to eliminate or forget our problems invite more problems.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Beer. There’s nothing I don’t like about it. I love the smell, the taste—even the sound of it. The cool thunk of the cap coming off the bottle, the silvery crack of the pop-top can. The cold sweat of the container against the fingers on a sultry afternoon. Every drinker has their poison. I am a beer man. You need to sip a whiskey. And I was never a sipper. I was a guzzler. I loved the feeling of it: to open wide the mouth of the soul and pour a cold one down my throat, with my mind racing ever-forward toward the next. Beer was kind and faithful, like an old friend.”
― Tod A

“Jeff’s’ father, Ethan Fortner, World War Two and Korean War hero, and one of the original agents of ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan’s post-war Central Intelligence Agency, sat in the chair before him. He had a tumbler of single-malt Scotch in his hand, and a Cuban cigar in the other. It was 1958, and his father was chastising him, again. Ethan Fortner was a patriot, and a legend in the intelligence community; but he was also a high functioning alcoholic and a bitter widower, ever since the day of Jeff’s birth.”
― C.G. Faulkner, The Edge of Reality

“I am wondering; an alcoholic and a ‘craziholic’ who is the greater ‘holic’? In other words, the dizziness of drunkenness and the dazedness of madness, which is the greater ‘ness’?”
― Vincent Okay Nwachukwu, Weighty 'n' Worthy African Proverbs - Volume 1

“I did what most alcoholics do in this situation: I took a hostage. I got married to Lydia.”
― Lol Tolhurst, Cured: The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys

“He still misses her in a way that talking about her, thinking about her, remains dangerous to indulge in - as an alcoholic can't think too much about how much she'd really like just one drink.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“Alas, I drinketh and my brain doth shrinketh.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“But as I said, one day only has so many hours and I cannot do it all at once. Besides, the alcohol was already bought and paid for. It would be a sin to let it go to waste.”
― Lucian Vicovan, Another fall from grace

“Sure, you love him. . . but is it time to love yourself MORE!?”
― Grace W. Wroldson, So You Love an . . . Alcoholic?: Lessons for a Codependent

“Sometimes you'd just forget the truth like a language you haven't spoken in for years: when you would try again in a quiet hour, you'd only stutter and falter. You would make a fool of yourself and promise you wouldn't ever try again. But over one too many drinks you would be trying, anyway, which would be when fluently you’d speak languages you wouldn’t even know when sober. The truth that sober Tom had unlearned was turning him into an alcoholic. Constantly it kept coaxing him to drink, because he couldn't get it out any other way .”
― Sima B. Moussavian, As the moon began to rust

“With Angela's help I'd become much more confident in my abilities yet I still didn't know who I was, what music I liked or felt stable enough to set my home up as a home and why was I training? It made me feel better but it wasn't leading to a fight so what was the point? I let the art therapy or self work as I'd started calling it slack and I'd stopped meditating. Before I knew it I was taking the late night parties home with me. Just a small bottle of Baileys of a night and then within weeks I was getting up hungover, going for a run and picking up more on the way home. I'd just survived, I'd won at everything and who cared? What did it change? One night I fell off a P.C chair and cracked a rib because I'd drank tequila too fast,”
― Tracie Daily, Checkmate: Care Abuse Love Murder

“I ordered a third pint, skillfully avoiding eye contact with the barman when Ange arrived. It had been four months since I last saw her. Four months since she'd got the phone call from the police. I'd been gone a week, and had ended up under Waterloo Bridge, apparently trying to find a building site I thought I was managing. I'd been out of work for a year. Without a word she drove me to a cheap hotel in Worthing, a few miles from home. She'd already dumped my clothes inside.
In the Green Man, Ange's blonde hair was longer than I remembered. I wanted to tell her she looked pretty but she curled her lip when she saw me, as if I smelt bad, and she didn't look pretty anymore.”
― Emily Elgar, If You Knew Her

“Alcoholics drowns in a sea of wine.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Everyone deserves proper medical care, regardless of their previous background.”
― J.M. Brister, Troubled Paradise

“Mon oncle, que Dieu ait son âme, était l'ivrogne officiel du village. Il s'y engageait en chancelant. Il criait : « Mon Dieu, je vous en prie, laissez-moi passer, je ne boirai plus jamais. » Mais, quand il arrivait sur l'autre rive, il dansait, il chantait, il criait : « Je boirai encore. Ah, ah, ah! »”
― Eugène Ionesco, Man With Bags