The key, I suppose, has less to do with insight than with willingness, the former being relatively useless without the latter.

There's something about sober living and sober thinking, about facing long afternoons without the numbing distraction of anesthesia that disabuses you of the belief in the externals, shows you that strength and hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things, but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even if it's painful and you're afraid.

Something is missing: that's as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness left where something lovely and solid used to be. ...There is something fundamentally insatiable about being human, as though we come into the world with a kind of built-in tension between the experience of being hungry, which is a condition of striving and yearning, and the experience of being fed, which may offer temporary satisfaction but always gives way to new strivings, new yearnings.

Why do I find the fantasy - husband, family, kids - exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life?

To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.

Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way.

For years, I ate the same foods every day, in exactly the same manner, at exactly the same times.