Addicts Quotes

Wouldn't it be better to spend our money on rescuing kids before they become addicts than on jailing them after we have failed? ~ Johann Hari

We all are addicts
...

Everything RELEASES dopamine! ~ Deyth Banger

Like so many addicts, I'd thought that if I could only sort out my life, I could then sort out my drinking. It was a revelation to see that it would be simpler the other way around ~ Pete Townshend

I think its better to do whatever is going to make you feel the most peaceful and happy. - Shoe Addicts Anonymous ~ Beth Harbison

Loving music had pushed all of us off the track- away from the normal pursuit of career, mate, and family, on an endless quest for that vibrating high, the plunge beyond time that comes only when you submerge yourself beneath the waterline of amplified sound. We were addicts, in a way, but also adept, enlightened by a noise most people considered no more than a pleasant distraction. What was left for us but to practice our art of listening? ~ Ann Powers

She was afraid of us moving in together. With Mark, domestic intimacy had become domestic claustrophobia; and had riddled romance (though she never quite said this) like woodworm. It wasn't that she was resistant to the glamourlessness of stray toenails and washing up and underpants and mug-rings and hoovering and boredom; on the contrary: it was that she was horrified by her own willingness to sink so deeply into the comfort of such details. A no nonsense streak in her identified the ordinary with truth, the exotic with delusion. She and Mark had delighted in dehumbugging their own romance, had (she confessed) Larkinized themselves into mundanity addicts. In Mark's case (she suspected) because he knew deep down he had no magic in him; in her own because she knew deep down that she had too much (no nonsense streak or not), and that to release it would be to lose him - and perhaps herself. Therefore they had wallowed together in cosiness, both suffering, Mark for fear of her leaving him, her for fear (certainty, actually) that the romantic inside her would rise up and smash their deadening familiarity to pieces. ~ Glen Duncan

Drugs will have a huge effect on my work for the rest of my life, whether I'm using or not. ~ Layne Staley

It's amazing how coke encompasses everything in your life. Addicts cannot confront life because they only think of their next hit. I ruined life for my parents, my sister and all my friends. ~ Kirstie Alley

Our whole society's a training ground for addicts. ~ Tim Tharp

To give up power to change for the better is inherently distasteful to everyone, and to force people to affirm that they are addicts or alcoholics so they can speak in a meeting is shameful and demoralizing. ~ Chris Prentiss

Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen. ~ Emil Cioran

We have this attitude that people become drug addicts against their will. That they couldn't possibly want this kind of life. But maybe that's not true. Maybe they don't want to live like other people - it just wouldn't suit them. ~ Jo Nesbo

My friends in prison were mostly women more like myself: not historical figures who I did not relate to as peers, but hookers and addicts. ~ Patricia McConnell

Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market. ~ Eric Hobsbawm

When you're using drugs, you're driven by this mystical black energy, a force inside you that just won't quit. And the weaker you get, the more you feed into that energy, and the more it fucks with you. When your spirit becomes dark and your lifestyle becomes dark, your existence is susceptible to infiltration by dark spirits. I've seen it so many times with addicts. You can see that they're controlled by dark energy, the way they look, their appearance, their voice, their behavior, it's not them. ~ Anthony Kiedis

Prime would eventually justify its existence. The service turned customers into Amazon addicts who gorged on the almost instant gratification of having purchases reliably appear two days after they ordered them. Signing up for Amazon Prime, Jason Kilar said at the time, "was like going from a dial-up to a broadband Internet connection. ~ Brad Stone

There is no creative expression of artistic value that has ever been produced by ex-drunkards and ex-drug-addicts. Who the hell would bother with a Rolling Stones without booze or with a Jimi Hendrix without heroin? ~ Lars Von Trier

Patrick Carnes wrote an apt description of the addict's behavior: "The addict substitutes a sick relationship to an event or a process for a healthy relationship with others. The addict's relationship with a mood-altering experience becomes central to his life" (Carnes 2001, 14). ~ George Collins

Sweet like liquor. Sweet like heroin. She's an addict's kind of bitter taste--my own personal hit of dope ~ Lana Sky

The very essence of the opiate high was expressed by a twenty-seven-year-old sex-trade worker. She had HIV and has since died. "The first time I did heroin," she said to me, "it felt like a warm, soft hug." In that phrase she told her life story and summed up the psychological and chemical cravings of all substance-dependent addicts. ~ Gabor Mate

Some people are addicts. If they don't act, they don't exist. ~ Jeanne Moreau

Addicts don't like when you tell them they are all the same. Of course not. Who would? But to me, addicts are like actresses, who all audition for the same role in a horror movie. It doesn't matter how they got to the audition. It doesn't matter how or where they grew up, once they get to the audition, all the actresses act in the same way and read the same lines. They all become the same character. ~ Oliver Markus

The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don't wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months' shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don't really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.
The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict's special need. You don't decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you're an addict. (Junky, Prologue, p. xxxviii) ~ William S. Burroughs

When I did these psychological characters like the drug addicts, the ones who were rejected and dejected, I started to feel a sort of melancholia which was very unnatural for me to have at a teenage. Then I avoided those characters. ~ Kangana Ranaut

the core of addiction doesn't lie in what you swallow or inject - it's in the pain you feel in your head. Yet we have built a system that thinks we will stop addicts by increasing their pain. "If I had to design a system that was intended to keep people addicted, I'd design exactly the system that we have right now, ~ Johann Hari

In the addiction recovery community, we recognise that addicts can starve themselves of receiving social, sexual or emotional nourishment. Sex and love addicts starve themselves of a healthy, personal relationship and, consequently, deliberately avoid wholesome relationships with other human beings. We're getting quite deep now, but there are many papers and books published on sexual and emotional anorexia. I have also suffered from emotional anorexia. It's no myth! ~ Christopher Dines

And my father always took me to the library. We were both book addicts. ~ Cornelia Funke

In the 1980s, when people were just beginning to talk about AIDS, there were just a few categories of those who were at high risk: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and Haitians. We were the only ones identified by nationality. ~ Edwidge Danticat

Harm reduction is often perceived as being inimical to the ultimate purpose of "curing" addiction - that is, of helping addicts transcend their habits and to heal. People regard it as "coddling" addicts, as enabling them to continue their destructive ways. It's also considered to be the opposite of abstinence, which many regard as the only legitimate goal of addiction treatment. Such a distinction is artificial. The issue in medical practice is always how best to help a patient. If a cure is possible and probable without doing greater harm, then cure is the objective. When it isn't - and in most chronic medical conditions cure is not the expected outcome - the physician's role is to help the patient with the symptoms and to reduce the harm done by the disease process.

In rheumatoid arthritis, for example, one aims to prevent joint inflammation and bone destruction and, in all events, to reduce pain. In incurable cancers we aim to prolong life, if that can be achieved without a loss of life quality, and also to control symptoms. In other words, harm reduction means making the lives of afflicted human beings more bearable, more worth living. That is also the goal of harm reduction in the context of addiction. Although hardcore drug addiction is much more than a disease, the harm reduction model is essential to its treatment. Given our lack of a systematic, evidencebased approach to addiction, in many cases it's futile to dream of a cure.

So long as s ~ Gabor Mate

Instead of Gnostics, we have Existentialists and God-is-dead theologians, instead of Neo-Platonists, devotees of Zen, instead of desert hermits, heroin addicts and Beats (who also, oddly enough, seem averse to washing), instead of mortification of the flesh, sado-masochistic pornography; as for our public entertainments, the fare offered by television is still a shade less brutal than that provided by the Amphitheatre, but only a shade and may not be so for long. ~ W. H. Auden

Because they are human beings, addicts long for wholeness, for fulfillment, and for the final good that believers call God. Like all idolatries, addiction taps this vital spiritual force and draws off its energies to objects and processes that drain the addict instead of fulfilling him. ~ Cornelius Plantinga

It's fitting that slave is from a group of words meaning "bonded," which is the same root word used in Titus 2:3 about women "addicted to much wine." In other words, as slaves to our neighbors, our cities, the people of the nations, we are addicted to them. We cannot get enough of them in our homes, in our lives. The more we love them, the more we want to love them. We are addicts for mission, bonded to people for the dream of the gospel in their lives. ~ Jen Hatmaker

As each day passed the community became more and more indoctrinated into the world of psychobabble. It was used to keep patients in subservient positions. "Poor impulse control," "defiance," or "you want what you want when you want it" were all catch phrases. Pronouncing judgement, Brian said, "These recovery institutions are all alike. Former addicts own and operate them. They're founded on the cliches these individuals accuse us of, grandiosity, arrogance, and selfishness. They take away human dignity and wrap themselves in the AA free spiritual principals, while charging so much money you'd think you were staying at the Ritz in Paris. ~ Stephanie Schoenberger

According to the CDC, cigarettes kill over 435,000 people a year in the United States. Most of us in Danbury were locked away for trading in illegal drugs. The annual death toll of illegal drug addicts, according to the same government study? Seventeen thousand. Heroin or coffin nails, you be the judge. ~ Piper Kerman

Growth has become addictive. Like heroin addiction, the habit distorts basic value judgments. Addicts of any kind are willing to pay increasing amounts for declining satisfactions. They have become tolerant to
escalating marginal disutility. They are blind to deeper frustration because they are absorbed in playing for always mounting stakes. ~ Ivan Illich

We are fossil fuel addicts. What happens when drug addicts detox? They can be rash, cranky, even psychotic and dangerous. It would be good for the environment if the entire economy abruptly quit fossil fuels, but that's not realistic. I wouldn't want to be around if it ever happened. Perhaps it's best to think of natural gas like methadone. It's a way for an energy addicted society to get off dirtier fuels and smooth out the detox bumps. ~ Russell Gold

I feel like all I've done lately is play really sexually-charged drug addicts. I don't know what's wrong with me. I've gotta go to Disneyland more and get more excitement. ~ Blake Lively

Addicts, in a very general but foundational sense, are constitutionally unable to put themselves first. They have spent their lives avoiding putting themselves first, hiding themselves and their problems behind habitual and destructive behaviours. ~ Morteza Khaleghi

Alcohol had a lot to do with it, too, and mental instability. All writers are narcissistic, manic-depressive drug addicts and alcoholics, and I am no exception. ~ T.C. Boyle

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

In my personal recovery, mindfulness has helped me to become aware of my trauma responses and given me an anchor to stay present when I have been triggered. Being able to feel my triggers without reacting must be largely credited to learning to anchor myself in my body through mindful body scan meditation. ~ Christopher Dines

A counsellor at the treatment centre where I got clean, herself a woman in recovery, surprised me when she said, 'How clever of you to find drugs. Well done, you found a way to keep yourself alive.' This made me feel quite tearful. I suppose because this woman, Jackie, didn't judge me or tell me I was stupid or tubthumpingly declare that 'drugs kill'. No, she told me that I had done well by finding something that made being me bearable… To be acknowledged as a person who was in pain and fighting to survive in my own muddled-up and misguided way made me feel optimistic and understood. It is an example of the compassion addicts need from one another in order to change. ~ Russell Brand

I like the hip writers: Fitzgerald, the guy who committed suicide, Hemingway, all those guys. Some of them were alcoholics and drug addicts but they had fun. They were real people. They formed the culture of American literature. Hemingway admired Tolstoy, Tolstoy admired Pushkin, and Mailer admired Hemingway. It all flows down. The greats are all connected. One day I'm gonna write a book myself. The first chapter will be about what a rough deal my momma got. She believed in you guys and your society. ~ Mike Tyson

Religion," [some] argue, "may be all right for certain emotional people, but you can't beat a man who believes in himself." But this self-confident generation has produced more alcoholics, more dope addicts, more criminals, more wars, more broken homes, more assaults, more embezzlements, more murders, and more suicides than any other generation that ever lived. It is time for all of us to take stock of our failures, blunders, and costly mistakes. It is about time that we put less confidence in ourselves and more trust and faith in God. ~ Billy Graham

Prison is quite literally a ghetto in the most classic sense of the world, a place where the U.S. government now puts not only the dangerous but also the inconvenient - people who are mentally ill, people who are addicts, people who are poor and uneducated and unskilled. ~ Piper Kerman

I sometimes think the recovery community is a picture of what the church should look like. I've experienced the Spirit of God hovering in those recovery rooms as a palpable presence, bringing healing to those who struggle and who submit to their higher power. It's my belief that Jesus, my Higher Power, hears those prayers, whether or not they know his name. His favorite people were, after all, the most broken among us - the outcasts, the misfits, the sick, and, yes, the addicts. ~ Barbara Cofer Stoefen

We have become a nation of Kodachrome, Nikon, Instamatic addicts. But we haven't yet developed a clear idea of the ethics of picture-taking ... Where do we get the right to bring other people home in a canister? Where did we lose the right to control our image? ~ Ellen Goodman

I like how Dallas Willard put it: "We don't believe something by merely saying we believe it," he said, "or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true." So perhaps a better question than "Do I believe in miracles?" is "Am I acting like I do?" Am I including the people who are typically excluded? Am I feeding the hungry and caring for the sick? Am I holding the hands of the homeless and offering help to addicts? Am I working to break down religious and political barriers that marginalize ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities and people with disabilities? Am I behaving as though life is more than a meaningless, chaotic mess, that there is some order in the storm? ~ Rachel Held Evans

The opposite of addiction is human connection. And I think that has massive implications for the war on drugs. The treatment of drug addicts almost everywhere in the world is much closer to Tent City than it is to anything in Portugal. Our laws are built around the belief that drug addicts need to be punished to stop them. But if pain and trauma and isolation cause addiction, then inflicting more pain and trauma and isolation is not going to solve that addiction. It's actually going to deepen it. ~ Johann Hari

I deplore brutality," he said. "It's not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy," direct. ~ William S. Burroughs

Today I say am an addict. A respectable addict, of course. Not like the desperate addicts who have cashed in their mortgage... After all, my drug is cheap, the cheapest of all drugs, and therefore the most pernicious... And my drug is everywhere I look: in the drive-through gas station's convenience store, in the supermarket, on the lusciously displayed menu of an exclusive restaurant. ~ Vera Tarman

Gately's snapped to the fact that people of a certain age and level of like life-experience believe they're immortal: college students and alcoholics/addicts are the worst: they deep-down believe they're exempt from the laws of physics and statistics that ironly govern everybody else. ~ David Foster Wallace

Government agencies are trying to get doctors to cut back on prescribing opioids. I understand that they need to do something about the epidemic of overdoses. However, labeling everyone as addicts, including those who responsibly take opioids for chronic pain, is not the answer. If the proposed changes take effect, they would force physicians to neglect their patients. Moreover, legitimate pain patients, like myself, would be left in agony on a daily basis. ~ Alison Moore,

Generally speaking, drug addicts are afraid of their emotions. Many have spent years avoiding uncomfortable feelings by finding all sorts of ways to suppress them – what we might call 'numbing out' (by means of alcohol, cigarettes, food, drugs, sex, controlling people, compulsively fantasizing and so on). ~ Christopher Dines

Just as a heroin addict chases a substance-induced high, sex addicts are bingeing on chemicals - in this case, their own hormones. ~ Alexandra Katehakis

I believe the money I make belongs to me and my family, not some governmental stooge with a bad comb-over who wants to give it away to crack addicts for squirting out babies. ~ Andy Rooney

Once and for all, people must understand that addiction is a disease. It's critical if we're going to effectively prevent and treat addiction. Accepting that addiction is an illness will transform our approach to public policy, research, insurance, and criminality; it will change how we feel about addicts, and how they feel about themselves. There's another essential reason why we must understand that addiction is an illness and not just bad behavior: We punish bad behavior. We treat illness. ~ David Sheff

The thing about love is one can never define it exactly. And as much of a mystery as that is and as familiar it is when we acknowledge it, words just aren't enough. So we find ourselves scratching the walls while our hair is falling out. Then we can't live without it. We become addicts. ~ Kevin Fuller

after the war, historian Marilyn Young warned: The U.S. can destroy Iraq's highways, but not build its own; create the conditions for epidemic in Iraq, but not offer health care to millions of Americans. It can excoriate Iraqi treatment of the Kurdish minority, but not deal with domestic race relations; create homelessness abroad but not solve it here; keep a half million troops drug free as part of a war, but refuse to fund the treatment of millions of drug addicts at home. . . . We shall lose the war after we have won it. ~ Howard Zinn

You know what's worse than being in rehab? Being in rehab over the holidays. You know what's worse than that? Being in a rehab that doesn't allow smoking. I mean, what the fuck? Addicts smoke. If we can't drink, we can't shoot up, and we can't ride the lightning bolt, at least we can smoke. ~ Darrell Hammond

THE DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY RULES 1. Control or Chaos. One must be in control of all interactions, feelings and personal behavior at all times - control is the major defense strategy for shame. In the less-than-human shameless marriage, both parents may be cocaine addicts or addicted in other ways. They may be dishonest criminals. The children experience chaos, as well as secrecy rules that guard their family's behavior. 2. Perfectionism or Anomie. Always be right in everything you do. The perfectionist rule always involves an imposed measurement. The fear and avoidance of the negative is the organizing principle of life. The members live according to an externalized image. No one ever measures up. In the less-than-human family, there are no rules - the children have no structure to guide them. ~ John Bradshaw

I meant that people will take anything that gives them a lift, whether it's alcohol or cocaine or the consciousness-expanding drugs or opiates. In Iran, until recently, they sold opium in shops legally, and they had 3,000,000 addicts in a population of 15,000,000. I don't believe that all those people were escaping from "complexes" or anything of the sort. They were simply exposed to it. ~ William S. Burroughs

We are all addicts in various stages of degradation where I live on the Upper West Side, some to heroin, some to small dogs, and some to the New York Times. The heroin is cut, the dogs are paranoid, and the Times cheats by skimping on the West Coast ball scores. No matter, each of us goes upon the street solely in pursuit of his own particular curse. ~ Murray Kempton

Tragically, because many addicts are not given sufficient love, nurturing and non-shaming dialogue at crucial stages in their early emotional development, they are on a quest to find contentment from a source outside of themselves.
Their parents might have provided bountifully for them; however, their parents were never fully emotionally present while parenting, which made their children feel starved of emotional nourishment. ~ Christopher Dines

Misplaced attachment to what cannot satiate the soul is not an error exclusive to addicts, but the common condition of mankind ~ Gabor Mate

Bad parent! Bad Parent! Your children will grow up to be drug addicts, derelicts, serial murderers and hedge fund managers! ~ Eric Flint

However,
when given the chance, many people choose cocaine over love. I wouldn't say that's a
bad choice. The endorphins released during infatuation are similar to heroin. OxyContin,
"the cuddling hormone," most often found in new mothers and newlyweds, is like ecstasy;
every touch tingles. I think I read that somewhere. Love exists in powder. Love exists in
pills. We are all addicts. ~ Pete Wentz

Addicts turn their pleasures into vengeful Gods. ~ Mason Cooley

People who aren't addicts want to know why I became one. They ask whether I had a midlife crisis. I'm only speaking for myself now, but I've stopped asking why and how. It's all about surrender and acceptance. It doesn't matter why I am an addict. ~ Kevin Sessums

I'm tired of these sophistries. I'm tired of these right-wing fuckers. They wouldn't lift a finger themselves. They work contentedly in offices and banks. Yet now they sit pontificating in parliament, in papers, impugning our motives, questioning our judgements. And why? Because they themselves need to feel better by putting down everyone whose work is so much harder than theirs. You only have to say the words 'social worker'…'probation officer' … 'counsellor' … for everyone in this country to sneer. Do you know what social workers do? Every day? They try and clear out society's drains. They clear out the rubbish. They do what no one else is doing, what no one else is willing to do. And for that, oh Christ, do we thank them? No, we take our own rotten consciences, wipe them all over the social worker's face, and say 'if…' FUCK! 'if I did the job, then of course if I did it…oh no, excuse me, I wouldn't do it like that…' Well I say: 'OK, then, fucking do it, journalist. Politician, talk to the addicts. Hold families together. Stop the kids from stealing in the streets. Deal with couples who beat each other up. You fucking try it, why not? Since you're so full of advice. Sure, come and join us. This work is one big casino. By all means. Anyone can play. But there's only one rule. You can't play for nothing. You have to buy some chips to sit at the table. And if you won't pay with your own time…with your own effort…then I'm sorry. Fuck
off! ~ David Hare

The growing policy-reform movement is a broad church. It includes everyone from ganja-smoking Rastafarians to free-market fundamentalists and all in between. There are socialists who think the drug war hurts the poor, capitalists who see a business opportunity, liberals who defend the right to choose, and fiscal conservatives who complain America is spending $40 billion a year on the War on Drugs rather than making a few billion taxing it. The movement can't agree on much other than that the present policy doesn't work. People disagree on whether legalized drugs should be controlled by the state, by corporations, by small businessmen, or by grow-your-own farmers, and on whether they should be advertised, taxed, or just handed out free in white boxes to addicts. ~ Ioan Grillo

Above all, I didn't want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion - an apt phrase, given John's worldview. In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people's feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed. ~ Lori Gottlieb

Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes. ~ Ezra Pound

Why do the greatest miracle stories seem to come from mission fields, either overseas or among the destitute here at home (the Teen Challenge outreach to drug addicts, for example)? Because the need is there. Christians are taking their sound doctrine and extending it to lives in chaos, which is what God has called us all to do. Without this extension of compassion it is all too easy for Bible teachers and authors to grow haughty. We become proud of what we know. We are so impressed with our doctrinal orderliness that we become intellectually arrogant. We have the rules and theories all figured out while the rest of the world is befuddled and confused about God's truth ... poor souls. ~ Jim Cymbala

There are many people for whom hate and rage pay a higher dividend of immediate satisfaction than love. Congenitally aggressive, they soon become adrenaline addicts, deliberately indulging psychically stimulated endocrines. Knowing that on self-assertion always ends by evoking other and hostile self-assertions, they sedulously cultivate their truculence. And, sure enough, very soon they find themselves in the thick of a fight. But a fight is what they most enjoy; for it is while they are fighting that their blood chemistry makes them feel most intensely themselves. "Feeling good", they naturally assume that they *are good. Adrenalin addiction is rationalized as Righteous Indignation and finally, like the prophet Jonah, they are convinced, unshakably, that they do well to be angry. ~ Aldous Huxley

He read because it gave him instant gratification in a way nothing else did,and as was the case with all addicts,gratification was the important thing. ~ Jeet Thayil

You are acting as though there is a choice in who you love. It doesn't really work that way. You love who you love."

"Now you're being ridiculous. Of course love is a choice."

"Being in a relationship with someone is a choice. Loving them isn't. There are plenty of people divorced today who still love one another. And there are a bunch of people out there who love someone with everything they have, but choose not to be with them because they're addicts or they're unreliable, or they cheated. The choosing to be with someone or not part, that is a choice. But who you end up falling for, that is completely out of your control. ~ Jessica Gadziala

Black-and-white thinking is the addict's mentality, which can be a bar to recovery when one is still active. But an addict who finds the willingness can then rely on the same trait to stay clean: "Just don't drink," they say in AA.
How's that going to work for an addicted eater? Food addicts have to take the tiger out of the cage three times a day. I've read that some drinkers have tried "controlled drinking," and it hasn't been very successful. Eaters don't just have to try it; they must practice it to survive.
Having a food plan is an attempt to address that, and having clear boundaries is a key to its working. But the comfort of all or nothing is just out of reach.
...
I'm saying that food addicts, unlike alcoholics and may others, have both to try for perfection and to accept that perfection is unattainable, and that the only tool left is a wholesome discipline.
The problem is, if we had any clue about wholesome discipline, we wouldn't be addicts. ~ Michael Prager

Every time I draw a clean breath, I'm like a fish out of water. ~ Narcotics Anonymous

I think a lot of ex-addicts. They find a lot of humor in what they did because they lived through it. ~ Dax Shepard

There were too many infected running around. Some looked as if they were dead already, but still they stumbled around like heroine addicts. Those ones did not move as fast as the newly infected, who were actually capable of running like a perfectly healthy person. They were the scary ones to worry about. All it took was one bite to ruin your day. ~ Jason Medina

I'm kind of quoting Thurston [Moore] and Kim [Gordon] in saying that about not being great with addicts, because they are the ones who said it to me. ~ Michael Stipe

My body craved sunshine; winter felt like an addict's withdrawal. ~ Sharon E. Rainey

A family is a social system and if that system is dysfunctional, the ramifications for the children growing up within it are grave. In what is known as generational drug addiction, the adult children of drug addicts and alcoholics are quietly suffering all over the world. By the time the children have grown up, dysfunction has been deeply ingrained in mind, body and brain. ~ Christopher Dines

In the Nazi Arbeit [work] camps back in '44 when a man was caught smoking one cigarette, the whole barracks would die," a patient, Ralph, once told me. "For one cigarette! Yet even so, the men did not give up their inspiration, their will to live and to enjoy what they got out of life from certain substances, like liquor or tobacco or whatever the case may be." I don't know how accurate his account was as history, but as a chronicler of his own drug urges and those of his fellow Hastings Street addicts, Ralph spoke the bare truth: people jeopardize their lives for the sake of making the moment livable. ~ Gabor Mate

In New York City real estate parlors took your money and lied to you, drug addicts relieved themselves in plain sight, and the Public Library was closed on Mondays. ~ Tom Hanks

Emotionally wounded addicts have an extremely difficult time with intimacy and with trusting themselves and others. They have a deep desire to trust, but their emotional scars and traumatic memories haunt them whenever an opportunity to trust another person arises. Naturally this can lead to a very lonely existence. ~ Christopher Dines

They'd fallen into their old ways, accusatory and evasive, which was reassuring in a perverted way. Leo understood the nasty pull of the regrettable familiar, how the old grooves could be so much more satisfying than the looming unknown. It's addicts stayed addicts. ~ Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

You're going to share a Moon Pie? Now? You know you can't get any more of those until you go back to the Sates, right? (Geary)
It's for a good cause. We need more addicts. Besides, there's always Grandpa to bail me out with an emergency shipment if I get too desperate. (Tory) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

about 40 million Chinese, a tenth of the country's population, were opium addicts. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Addiction beggins whith the hope that something 'out there' can instantly fill up the emptiness inside. ~ Jean Kilbourne

I continued to work with uncertainty and the impending 90 days ticking away at the shelter. I didn't make enough money to pay rent in L.A., my employer was in a downward spiral, headed for bankruptcy and there was really nothing else keeping me in Hollywood. I didn't have a band, family or friends. The only people I associated with were coworkers at Tower and the drug addicts at the homeless shelter. And both were about to become history. I contemplated the scenario of not finding a place to rent and Tower Records going out of business. I had to figure out what I was going to do? Where was I going to go? I had to make a decisive, drastic decision! ~ K.D. Sanders

I've learned to stay away from publicity addicts, people who want to be famous for no reason. ~ Paz De La Huerta

Everybody has fucked-up families, even normal kids, even the ones who aren't in here. There's no magic math equation that makes us addicts, nothing that separates us from everyone else. ~ Amy Reed

There are criminals who are drug users, but most addicts are criminals only by virtue of prohibition or from resorting to crime to pay inflated black market prices. ~ Danny Sugerman

There is a beautiful moment in the bible when the prophet Elijah feels God's resence. The Scriptures say that a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart, but God was not in the wind. After the wind, there was an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. It was the whisper of God. Today we can hear the whisper where we least expect it; in a baby refugee and in a homeless rabbi, in crack addicts and displaced children, in a groaning creation. ~ Shane Claiborne

People who often talk about showing a 'stiff upper lip' are choosing to suffer in silence, isolating themselves from others and destroying a chance to be authentic and sincere. I have spent time with many male recovering addicts who have healed as a result of talking about their emotional pain and depression. Some of them fought in the first and second wars in Iraq; they are physically hard men and are certainly not 'weak'. ~ Christopher Dines

Drug warriors' staunch opposition to needle exchanges to prevent the spread of HIV in addicts delayed the programs' widespread introduction in most states for years. A federal ban on funding for these programs wasn't lifted until 2009. Contrast this with what happened in the U.K. At the peak of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1990s, the HIV infection rate in IV drug users in the U.K. was about 1%. In New York City, the American epicenter, that figure was 50%. The British had introduced widespread needle exchange in 1986. That country had no heterosexual AIDS epidemic. ~ Maia Szalavitz

I work with The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. I sit proudly as one of only two recovering addicts on their board. ~ Jamie Lee Curtis

These are his people, this congregation of misfits, crack addicts, and drunks, the unshaven, unwashed, unemployed, and unwanted. ~ Lee Strobel