#alcoholism

It used to be that each time you fell in love, the effort of loving released in you the energy to hold everything together a little longer. Then, after several months or years, when things began to crack apart again, you would fall in love with someone else. New energy would be released, and for a time you and your world would be safe once more. By now, however, you have exhausted that. There seems to be no energy left - if you had discovered alcohol earlier it might have saved a few broken hearts. For you, alcohol is not the problem - it's the solution: dissolving all the separate parts into one. A universal solvent. An ocean. ↗

— Ron Butlin

#love

I knew that I had been partially right in the storeroom above the bar on Christmas Day. Whoever I had become had to die. ↗

— Craig Ferguson

#change #christmas #death #suicide #change

Looking For Love and Looking In All The Wrong Places ↗

— Gordon Rouston

#love

My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#hemingway #sentimentality-cruelty-ideology #men

When you quit drinking you stop waiting. ↗

— Caroline Knapp

#drinking #sobriety #love

One must binge constantly to remain self-employed. To sober up would result in getting fired for over-efficiency. ↗

— Bauvard

#binging #employment #funny #humor #sobriety

Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other. ↗

— Tennessee Williams

#death #father #death

You're walking down Fool's Street, Laura used to say when he was drinking, and she had been right. He had known even then that she was right, but knowing had made no difference; he had simply laughed at her fears and gone on walking down it, till finally he had stumbled and fell. Then, for a long time, he stayed away, and if he had stayed away long enough he would have been all right; but one night he began walking down it again - and met the girl. It was inevitable that on Fool's Street there should be women as well as wine. He had walked down it many times in many different towns, and now he was walking down it once again in yet another town. Fool's Street never changed, no matter where you went, and this one was no different from the others. The same skeletonic signs bled beer names in vacant windows; the same winos sat in doorways nursing muscatel; the same drunk tank awaited you when at last your reeling footsteps failed. And if the sky was darker than usual, it was only because of the rain which had begun falling early that morning and been falling steadily ever since. ↗

— Robert F. Young

#alcoholism #drunk #change

Karl Marx: "Religion is the opiate of the masses." Carrie Fisher: "I did masses of opiates religiously. ↗

— Carrie Fisher

#addiction #alcoholism #celebrities #dysfunctional-families #fiction

People with family histories of alcoholism tend to have lower levels of endorphins- the endogenous morphine that is responsible for many of our pleasure responses- than do people genetically disinclined to alcoholism. Alcohol will slightly raise the endorphin level of people without the genetic basis for alcoholism; it will dramatically raise the endorphin level of people with that genetic basis. Specialists spend a lot of time formulating exotic hypotheses to account for substance abuse. Most experts point out, strong motivations for avoiding drugs; but there are also strong motivations for taking them. People who claim not to understand why anyone would get addicted to drugs are usually people who haven't tried them or who are genetically fairly invulnerable to them. ↗

— Andrew Solomon

#depression #disease #family