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I lived on rum, I tell you. It's been meat and drink, and man and wife, to me.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, Treasure Island
Wine hath drowned more men than the sea.
For most normal folks, drinking means conviviality, companionship and colorful imagination. It means release from care, boredom and worry. It is joyous intimacy with friends and a feeling that life is good. But not so with us in those last days of heavy drinking.
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, The Big Book
I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day.
FRANK SINATRA, quoted in The Hangover Survival Guide
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick
When you go out with a drunk, you'll notice how a drunk fills your glass so he can empty his own. As long as you're drinking, drinking is okay. Two's company. Drinking is fun. If there's a bottle, even if your glass isn't empty, he'll pour a little in your glass before he fills his own.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Invisible Monsters
I have taken more good from alcohol than alcohol has taken from me.
- Bacchus ever fair and young,
- Drinking joys did first ordain.
- Bachus's blessings are a treasure,
- Drinking is the soldier's pleasure,
- Rich the treasure,
- Sweet the pleasure--
- Sweet is pleasure after pain.
JOHN DRYDEN, Alexander's Feast
As we became subjects of King Alcohol, shivering denizens of his mad realm, the chilling vapor that is loneliness settled down. It thickened, ever becoming blacker. Some of us sought out sordid places, hoping to find understanding companionship and approval. Momentarily we did -- then would come oblivion and the awful awakening to face the hideous Four Horsemen -- Terror, Bewilderment, Frustration, Despair.
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, The Big Book
Scientists announced that they have located the gene for alcoholism. Scientists say they found it at a party, talking way too loudly.
Refrain from drink which is the source of all evil--and the ruin of half the workmen in this Country.
GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to Thomas Green, Mar. 31, 1789
If a man rejoice not in his drinking, he is mad; for in drinking it's possible ... to fondle breasts, and to caress well tended locks, and there is dancing withal, and oblivion of woe.
An aching head and trembling limbs, which are the inevitable effects of drinking, disincline the hands from work.
GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to Thomas Green, Mar. 31, 1789
Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.
WILLA CATHER, "On the Divide," The Troll Garden
Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.
The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and of generosity. What one of us but can call to mind some relative more promising in youth than all his fellows, who has fallen a sacrifice to his rapacity?
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, speech, Feb. 22, 1842
Physicians who are familiar with alcoholism agree there is no such thing as making a normal drinker out of an alcoholic.
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, The Big Book
- Candy
- Is dandy
- But liquor
- Is quicker.
I always drank, from when it was legal for me to drink. And there was never a time for me when the goal wasn't to get as hammered as I could possibly afford to. I never understood social drinking, that's always seemed to me like kissing your sister.
STEPHEN KING, interview, Sept. 14, 2000
The contrast which exists between the abstemious man and the drunkard is this--the former governs his affairs, but the affairs of the latter govern him.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs
A drunkard is like a whiskey-bottle, all neck and belly and no head.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
All excess is ill, but drunkenness is of the worst sort. It spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous and mad. In fine, he that is drunk is not a man: because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast.
WILLIAM PENN, Some Fruits of Solitude
The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death.
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, The Big Book
Alcoholism is a disease of the whole person.
MAURICE GELINAS, How to Overcome Alcoholism
Let us be clear and concise on this point: Alcoholism is a disease. We can never be cured of alcoholism, but we can arrest the disease and pull it up on its tracks. There is no such thing as a cured alcoholic or an ex-alcoholic. They simply don't exist ... the recovering alcoholic is only ever one drink away from relapse.
TYRONE PATRICK FAHEY, One Man's Take on Beating Alcoholism
If alcoholism is a disease, it is a strange one, because the alcoholic is the most direct cause of his or her own sickness. If alcoholism is not a disease, then what else might it be?... If alcoholism is defined as a personal failure or a moral weakness, alcoholics are less likely to be viewed with sympathy and compassion. They might be admonished to quit drinking, be put in prison, or be punished in some other way. These responses to their alcoholism would be administered primarily by the legal system rather than the health care system, as medical interventions are not designed to remedy moral failings.
WAYNE WEITEN, Psychology: Themes and Variations
One of the most important facts to remember about alcoholism is its progression. Alcoholism begins in an early stage that looks nothing at all like a life-threatening disease, proceeds into a middle stage where problems begin to appear and intensify, and gradually advances into the late, degenerative stages of obvious physiological dependence, physical and psychological deterioration, and loss of control.
WILLIAM F. ASBURY, Beyond the Influence
Alcoholism is not a symptom of underlying problems. It is an illness in and by itself, producing its own symptoms. Before the onset of the disease alcoholism, the excessive drinking of alcoholic liquor generally is symptomatic of underlying problems. Once the line has been crossed and the drinker has become an alcoholic drinker, his drinking is then symptomatic of that illness.
MAURICE GELINAS, How to Overcome Alcoholism
To understand why alcoholism is a disease, it is important to know about the neurological effects of alcohol on the brain. Simply put, heavy drinking over time causes changes in neurotransmitter activity that the brain must adapt to. In people physically predisposed to alcoholism, this adaptation eventually turns into a fixed craving as the body finds it cannot live without the effects of alcohol. Something that started out voluntarily and enjoyable turns into something more serious--a physical dependence that can cause horrible withdrawel symptoms. This explains why alcoholics cannot just quit drinking like their nonaddicted counterparts can. Thus, it is not the behavior of drinking that is defined as an illness. It is only when the craving to drink becomes involuntary that alcoholism can be thought of as a disease.
MARIA GIFFORD, Alcoholism
Alcoholism is a devastating, potentially fatal disease. The primary symptom of having it is telling everyone--including yourself--that you are not an alcoholic.
HERBERT L. GRAVITZ & JULIE D. BOWDEN, Recovery: A Guide for Adult Children of Alcoholics
He that is a drunkard is qualified for all vice.
WELLINS CALCOTT, Thoughts Moral and Divine
Browse Alcoholism Quotes II
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