342 Quotes About Alcoholism

oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)

I decided to believe that [my mother] had made it her life task not to pass on her damage to me, to give me good gifts, including the ones she had been unable to give herself. And, not right away, but eventually, I decided to believe that she had succeeded.

Sure, genetics do play a role in alcoholism. You're more likely to be an alcoholic if one or both of your parents are also alcoholics. But that's just one part of the equation; the other part is your behavior. You can't become an alcoholic if you never take a drink. So if you know you're predisposed to addiction because you have a family history, then just don't get started, and you'll never find yourself on that path.

Bourbon, Kentucky bourbon especially, is like Dante’s Inferno in a glass, fire walks down your throat, lungs, and heart and everything in between with an unpleasant after-taste. We got along just fine.

...people who don't live at least a little bit in fear, have nothing left to live for.

I didn't recognize it as such then, because I was only thirteen years old, but later I found it a bit ironic that my first time seeing a woman in all her form and glory and saggy drug-tainted tits, arrived at the same exact time as my first introduction to death.

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?

Being crazy, for the rest of us, is a form of sanity.

Beat him until he softens. Lift his ragged body and raise him with your whiskey breath. Get him out alive. Watch from your grave as he beats his own child, because you beat him, because yours beat you, because his beat his, because his beat his...