342 Quotes About Alcoholism

I want to feel calm and at ease. Like someone who lives in Half Moon Bay, California, and makes hummus from scratch. Instead, I feel like I'm a contestant on some awful supermarket game show where I've got sixty seconds to hurl my shopping cart down the aisles, piling it with as much as possible before the buzzer goes off.

Now I see that it isn't the problems along the way that make us or break us. It's how we learn to stand and face them that makes the difference.

I think my father is like the Holy Trinity with three people in him, the one in the morning with the paper, the one at night with the stories and the prayers, and then the one who does the bad thing and comes home with the smell of whiskey and wants us to die for Ireland.

The line that ran through my life wasn’t an elegant, silken thread.  Mine had become an inextricably tangled, balled up mess, yet the line remained unbroken; it still ran end to end.

As a teenager, I loved how I looked in the outfit of using drugs and exercising poor judgement. I had tried it on, spun around in the mirror, and decided I would choose this look, this image, this identity. But eventually and without realising it, the ability to choose had gone. I had become what at first I had only pretended to be.

I carried a bravado about my drinking like I was a hero of debauchery. But on that Christmas Day, I felt like shit. I had a vague realisation that I was just trying to keep up with some version of myself that I had decided was accurate.

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.

She'd either be a heartless mother and wife or a spineless enabler, when all she really wanted was the man she'd once believed him to be.

In retrospect, this seems to summarize all the insanity of that time. Guy is standing on top of a burning building. Helicopter arrives, hovers, drops a rope ladder. Climb up! the man leaning out of the helicopter's door shouts. Guy on top of burning building responds, Give me two weeks to think about it.