Alcoholism Quotes

“I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. On the other hand, when I got drunk I screamed, went crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn't fit the other. I didn't care.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius.”
― Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons

“Karl Marx: "Religion is the opiate of the masses."

Carrie Fisher: "I did masses of opiates religiously.”
― Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge

“This is a good place," he said.
"There's a lot of liquor," I agreed.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope.”
― Russell Brand

“Some things just couldn't be protectd from storms. Some things simply needed to be broken off...Once old thing were broken off, amazingly beautiful thing could grow in their place.”
― Denise Hildreth

“Alcohol ruined me financially and morally, broke my heart and the hearts of too many others. Even though it did this to me and it almost killed me and I haven't touched a drop of it in seventeen years, sometimes I wonder if I could get away with drinking some now. I totally subscribe to the notion that alcoholism is a mental illness because thinking like that is clearly insane.”
― Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot

“Hitch: making rules about drinking can be the sign of an alcoholic,' as Martin Amis once teasingly said to me. (Adorno would have savored that, as well.) Of course, watching the clock for the start-time is probably a bad sign, but here are some simple pieces of advice for the young. Don't drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food. Don't drink if you have the blues: it's a junk cure. Drink when you are in a good mood. Cheap booze is a false economy. It's not true that you shouldn't drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain. Hangovers are another bad sign, and you should not expect to be believed if you take refuge in saying you can't properly remember last night. (If you really don't remember, that's an even worse sign.) Avoid all narcotics: these make you more boring rather than less and are not designed—as are the grape and the grain—to enliven company. Be careful about up-grading too far to single malt Scotch: when you are voyaging in rough countries it won't be easily available. Never even think about driving a car if you have taken a drop. It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't ever be responsible for it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“There's not alcoholic in the world who wants to be told what to do. Alcoholics are sometimes described as egomaniacs with inferiority complexes. Or, to be cruder, a piece of shit that the universe revolves around.”
― Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue

“When you quit drinking you stop waiting.”
― Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story

“Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other.”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“People with family histories of alcoholism tend to have lower levels of endorphins- the endogenous morphine that is responsible for many of our pleasure responses- than do people genetically disinclined to alcoholism. Alcohol will slightly raise the endorphin level of people without the genetic basis for alcoholism; it will dramatically raise the endorphin level of people with that genetic basis. Specialists spend a lot of time formulating exotic hypotheses to account for substance abuse. Most experts point out, strong motivations for avoiding drugs; but there are also strong motivations for taking them. People who claim not to understand why anyone would get addicted to drugs are usually people who haven't tried them or who are genetically fairly invulnerable to them.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“Whether I or anyone else accepted the concept of alcoholism as a disease didn't matter; what mattered was that when treated as a disease, those who suffered from it were most likely to recover.”
― Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot

“One day at a time, sweet Jesus. Whoever wrote that one hadn’t a clue. A day is a fuckin’ eternity”
― Roddy Doyle, Paula Spencer

“I drink out of desperation. Life is too dreary to endure. The misery, loneliness, crampedness — they're heartbreaking.[...] What feelings do you suppose a man has when he realizes that he will never know happiness or glory as long as he lives? Hard work. All that amounts to is food for the wild beasts of hunger.”
― Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun

“My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.”
― Robert Frost

“If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

“It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing? Would Great Ormond Street be so attractive a cause if its beds were riddled with obnoxious little criminals that had “brought it on themselves?”
― Russell Brand

“...you're either gonna spend your life fucking pussy, or taking it to church.”
― Dave Matthes, Bar Nights

“I knew that I had been partially right in the storeroom above the bar on Christmas Day.

Whoever I had become had to die.”
― Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot

“I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one-half his days and mad the other.”
― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

“Millions of deaths would not have happened if it weren’t for the consumption of alcohol. The same can be said about millions of births.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young and believing”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“I'm sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, "Yeah, but studies say kids can buy drugs more easily than they can buy alcohol." To which I always respond, "I guess that means you keep heroin in your liquor cabinet?”
― Koren Zailckas, Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“I have, he went on, betrayed myself with
belief, deluded myself with love
tricked myself with sex.

the bottle is damned faithful, he said,
the bottle will not lie”
― Charles Bukowski, Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit

“Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested - ask any doctor - that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“I found the prospect daunting, but somehow comforting, too, because the counselors insisted it could be done, and, after all, many of them were recovering alcoholics themselves.”
― Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot

“Those unexpected morality lessons provided by the trip had jolted me into some kind of action. It was time to jettison the past before the present jettisoned me. This was my first veiled attempt at recovery. Although perhaps I was just running away again. I returned to Glasgow, planning to say a final goodbye to Anne and get out of her life, but ended up drinking with buddies in the Chip Bar and never seeing her. I called her instead to say I was moving to London and told her she could have the house and everything else we owned, which wasn't much. I think she was as relieved as I was that I was leaving town for good.”
― Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot