Addiction Quotes - In the beginning war looks and feels
like love
“So the question really is, Why doesn't that pain make
you say, I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say
that, but you don't.”
― Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
“Drinking is such a necessity to human life that people
cannot fathom an individual who, like a child confined to a church pew, gets
little enjoyment out of it and would rather do other things.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy
“Anything that inspires addiction or obsession -
substances, entertainment, beauty, secrecy - is dangerous in that it can lead
to isolation, self-absorption, and disconnection, to paralyzed stasis: an
immobility that gathers like a force.”
― Greg Carlisle, Elegant Complexity: A Study of David
Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
“I, the unfortunate Doctor Polyakov, who became
addicted to morphine in February of this year, warn anyone who may suffer the
same fate not to attempt to replace morphine with cocaine. Cocaine is a most
foul and insidious poison. Yesterday Anna barely managed to revive me with
camphor injections and today I am half dead.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, Morphine
“It’s easier for me to make sense of it that way than
it is for me to face the other way—reality. And yet, those evil spirits that
were unleashed—be they fake entities from a stupid carnival ride, or cruel
malevolencies from dark spiritual chasms of our universe—have stayed with me
all these years”
― Tim Cummings, Orphans
“It was not long before I discovered that withdrawing
addicts lost their composure in exactly the same manner that careless
millionaires lose their money: gradually, then suddenly.”
― Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle
“When the door to suicide opens it becomes a viable
option that you never considered before, but, once ajar, it initiates an
invasion strategy. Day by day thoughts blacken under the occupation of the new
inhabitant. It becomes an all-consuming addiction that makes its home in your
head and heart and, before you know it, the whole neighbourhood is talking and
thinking about suicide. Eventually, the mind is overwhelmed by the conspiracy
of its own darkness and begins to wage war against the body. At this point, the
body is powerless.”
― B.G. Bowers, Death and Life
“My fear of abandonment is exceeded only by my terror
of intimacy.”
― Ethlie Ann Vare
“The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain
of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.”
― Russell Brand
“Drugs suck more than anything else I have ever liked
so much.”
― Ashly Lorenzana
“In the beginning war looks and feels like love. But
unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like
all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places
upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is
hard to live outside war's grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve
any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb.”
― Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
“A lot of people who find out about the things I do
immediately figure I'm just a pathetic "druggie" with nothing to say
that is worth hearing. They talk endless bull shit of "recovery!"
They make it sound like some amazing discovery...don't they know I'm far too
busy trying to recover me?”
― Ashly Lorenzana
“This is what I think. Addiction is just a way of
trying to get at something else. Something bigger. Call it transcendence if you
want, but it's a fucked-up way, like a rat in a maze. We all want the same
thing. We all have this hole. The thing you want offers relief, but it's a
trap.”
― Tess Callahan, April & Oliver
“One who will not accept solitude, stillness and quiet
recurring moments...is caught up in the wilderness of addictions; far removed
from an original state of being and awareness. This is 'dis-ease.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph
over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence
“It was the hardest boyfriend I ever had to break up
with [referring to crystal methamphetamines]”
― Fergie
“Intensity-seeking is an enslavement of our own
perpetuation. When we step out of the delirium of always seeking someone new,
and meet the same old sad and lonely child within, our healing journey begins.
Exhausting ourselves with novelty is a defense against our deepest pain, one
that we cannot outrun. But once we stop and feel our losses, we can begin our
healing journey and be the authentic, joyous person we were born to be.”
― Alexandra Katehakis, Mirror of Intimacy: Daily
Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence
“Some people read for instruction, which is
praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from
habit, and I suppose that is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that
lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me, and
my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible
man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium-seeker to
his pipe. I would sooner read the catalogue of the Army and Navy stores or
Bradshaw's Guide than nothing at all, and indeed I have spent many delightful
hours over both these works. At one time I never went out without a second-hand
bookseller's list in my pocket. I know no reading more fruity. Of course to
read in this way is as reprehensible as doping, and I never cease to wonder at
the impertinence of great readers who, because they are such, look down on the
illiterate. From the standpoint of what eternity is it better to have read a
thousand books than to have ploughed a million furrows? Let us admit that
reading with us is just a drug that we cannot do without — who of this band does not
know the restlessness that attacks him when he has been severed from reading
too long, the apprehension and irritability, and the sigh of relief which the
sight of a printed page extracts from him? — and so let us be no more vainglorious than the poor slaves of
the hypodermic needle or the pint-pot.
And like the dope-fiend who cannot move from place to
place without taking with him a plentiful supply of his deadly balm I never
venture far without a sufficiency of reading matter. Books are so necessary to
me that when in a railway train I have become aware that fellow-travellers have
come away without a single one I have been seized with a veritable dismay. But
when I am starting on a long journey the problem is formidable.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Collected Short Stories: Volume
4
“In her glamorous quest for the darkest light and the
lowest high, she now found herself wallowing on the bottom of a filthy garbage
bin.”
― Terri Blackstock, Intervention
“The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the
three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and
Colon.
Our government's got a war on drugs....But get this:
The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are
both perfectly legal.
One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George
W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed, or tiddley-poo, or
four sheets to the wind a good deal of time from when he was sixteen until he
was forty. When he was forty-one, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him
knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.
Other drunks have seen pink elephants.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
“I found Bombay and opium, the drug and the city, the
city of opium and the drug Bombay”
― Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis
