Alcoholism

“Alcohol abuse and alcoholism have a different physiologic effect on women than on men. Societal attitudes about women and alcohol and internal (self-perception) and external (environmental) factors can create barriers to the detection and treatment of female alcohol abusers.”

“Morpheus' gifts used to come to me in bottles, Beam and black Jack Daniel's, straight up with a frosted schooner of Jax on the side, while the rain poor down in the neon glow outside the window of an all-night bar not far from the Huey Long Bridge. In a half hour I could kick open a furnace door and fling into the flames all the snakes and squeaking bats that lived inside me. Except the next morning they would writhe with new life in the ashes and come back home, stinking and hungry."”

“In my lowest moments, the only reason I didn't commit suicide was that I knew I wouldn't be able to drink any more if I was dead.”

“It's not like anything you can beat—no matter how hard you try. … It's just that you can't really help them and it's so discouraging—it's all for nothing.”

“Jesus," he said to himself. "Drunk for ten years.”

“...and another little drink wouldn't do us any harm.”

“Habitual intoxication is the epitome of every crime.”

“Addictions come from shortages in infancy. People try to compensate this way. Alcoholism is generally produced from a shortage in mother's milk. And heroin addiction is usually due to a lack of being, the absence of recognition; the drug fills the emptiness of not being loved.”

“‘Tis not the eating, nor ‘tis not the drinking that is to be blamed, but the excess.”

“Drink is in itself a good creature of God, but the abuse of drink is from Satan.”

“Mrs. Morse had been drinking all the afternoon; while she dressed to go out, she felt herself rising pleasurably from drowsiness to high spirits. But as she came out into the street the effects of the whisky deserted her completely, and she was filled with a slow, grinding wretchedness so horrible that she stood swaying on the pavement, unable for a moment to move forward.”

“Alcoholism is the disease of more.”

“As an alcoholic, you will violate your standards quicker than you can lower them. You will do shit that even the Devil would go "Dude...."”

“Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.”