Addiction
Quotes - The Memory Of You Is Like A Drug To Me
“It’s
strange how what drives us may abandon us midstream, how what tickles our ears
with lies one moment may tell us truths that knock us on our emotional ass the
next.
After
all, it is an unbelievably real world, with Darwin scribbling his thoughts into
books and telling us what monkeys we are. Each of us explores possibility,
hungry for sustaining adoration, yet we know enough to render ourselves
helpless.
We
strive and strain, bellow and believe, we learn, and everything we learn tells
us the same thing: life is one great meaningful experience in a meaningless
world. Brilliance has many parts, yet each part is incomplete.
We
live, heal and attempt to piece together a picture worth the price of our very
lives.
The
picture I saw presented demonic executioners, who crippled those daring to look
and consumed souls without defense. They’re everywhere. Some are people we
know. Others are the great fears and addictions of our lives.”
―
Christopher Hawke
“We
who were not so pathologically far out on the spectrum of self-involvement, we
dwellers of the visible spectrum who could imagine how it felt to go beyond
violet but were not ourselves beyond it, could see that David was wrong not to
believe in his lovability and could imagine the pain of not believing in it.
How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely
difficult--what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and
self-delusion love appears to be--if you are not! And yet ... the difference
between well and not well is in more respects a difference of degree than of
kind. Even though David laughed at my much milder addictions and liked to tell
me that I couldn't even conceive of how moderate I was, I can still extrapolate
from these addictions, and from the secretiveness and solipsism and radical
isolation and raw animal craving that accompany them, to the extremity of his.
I can imagine the sick mental pathways by which suicide comes to seem like the one
consciousness-quenching substance that nobody can take away from you.”
―
Jonathan Franzen
“Managing
your terror all by yourself gives rise to another set of problems:
dissociation, despair, addictions, a chronic sense of panic, and relationships
that are marked by alienation, disconnections, and explosions. Patients with
these histories rarely make the connection between what has happened to them a
long time ago and how they currently feel and behave. Everything just seems
unmanageable.”
―
Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the
Healing of Trauma
“Hey,
I stopped smoking cigarettes. Isn't that something? I'm on to cigars now. I'm
on to a five-year plan. I eliminated cigarettes, then I go to cigars, then I go
to pipes, then I go to chewing tobacco, then I'm on to that nicotine gum”
―
John Candy
“The
Memory Of You Is Like A Drug To Me”
―
Jeremy Aldana
“This
is the kind of thing that makes sense to them; this is a language they know.
They know what to do with`disease'. They know how to attach a doctor's medical
descriptions to hope.”
―
Amy Reed, Clean
“In
this country, don’t forget, a habit is no damn private hell. There’s no
solitary confinement outside of jail. A habit is hell for those you love. And
in this country it’s the worst kind of hell for those who love you.”
―
Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues
“The
book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to
spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those
literary counterparts to the opium den.”
―
Phillip Adams
“Some
people are silently struggling with burdens that would break our backs.”
―
Wayne Gerard Trotman
“I'd
rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik
instructions.”
―
Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
“I
got addicted. News, particularly daily news, is more addictive than crack
cocaine, more addictive than heroin, more addictive than cigarettes. ”
―
Dan Rather
“If,
by the virtue of charity or the funded Ennet House, you will acquire many
exotic new facts. You will find out that once MA’s Department of Social
Services has taken a mother’s children away for any period of time, they can
always take them away again, D.S.S ., like at will, empowered by nothing more
than a certain signature-stamped form. I.e. once deemed Unfit— no matter why or
when, or what’s transpired in the meantime— there’s nothing a mother can
do.(...)That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once
you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in
order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important
to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or
that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you
in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required A.M. and P.M.
prayers , you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to
lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something
and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.(...)That certain
persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most
nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often
rather early on.(...)That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather
that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a
stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for
more than a few seconds.(...)That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people
to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people.(...)That you will become
way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how
seldom they do.(...)That most Substance -addicted people are also addicted to
thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their
own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for addictive -type thinking is:
Analysis-Paralysis. That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about
themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and
then getting
ready
for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they
stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time
and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and
consequences of are never good.(...)That other people can often see things
about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are
stupid.(...)That certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people
believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and
gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.”
―
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
“Why
do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like
long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out.”
―
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
“He
was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far
away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so
steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls...”
―
Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm
“Quit
while you’re ahead.
All
the best gamblers do.”
―
Baltasar Gracián y Morales
“If
that’s the case, I understand why emotions are hard for you. You’ve numbed
yourself to make room for the grief you carry.”
―
Brent Jones, The Fifteenth of June
