Quotes About Addiction

The opposite of addiction is human connection. And I think that has massive implications for the war on drugs. The treatment of drug addicts almost everywhere in the world is much closer to Tent City than it is to anything in Portugal. Our laws are built around the belief that drug addicts need to be punished to stop them. But if pain and trauma and isolation cause addiction, then inflicting more pain and trauma and isolation is not going to solve that addiction. It's actually going to deepen it.

Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre.

Any physical addiction, it doesn't matter how long they've been taking it or how full of it their body is, and addiction, would, between three and thirty days, be completely cleared from the system. Usually closer to three days than thirty days. But it is the emotional craving that must be tended to.

Addiction is craving fulfillment from something that cannot provide fulfillment. In this sense it is not different than the basic mechanism of ignorance that keeps everyone in bondage. With substance addiction the mind/body sets up a vicious cycle that perpetuates the dependence.

What has drug addiction done for me? It's cost me my career, my fortune and basically my sex life when I found out I was HIV positive.

I just think the whole disease model of addiction is crap. It's rooted in fiction and junk science.

I did a comedy with Al Franken about his character Stuart Smalley, which was really about alcoholism and addiction and codependency. It had some painful stuff in it. When we showed it to focus groups, some of them actually said, "If I want to see a dysfunctional family, I'll stay home."

What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.

If friends are taking more from you than they're giving, it doesn't matter if they are in the throes of addiction. It does not matter if they are suicidal. It does not matter if they were nice to you when you were kids. It doesn't matter if you've told them things you've never told anybody else and only they can relate. If this person is draining you, this person is not right for you.

Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.

The underlying motivation that drives all addiction is our insistence on avoiding pain. However, the pain you are avoiding is based in the past, and has nothing to do with the present moment.

Help me give up my addiction to Hope.

We must be unafraid to be utterly honest, to honor our gut feelings, and to say and do the unpopular when necessary. We have to give up our addiction to other people's opinions and surrender to the freedom of acting with strength and courage.

What fascinates me about addiction and obsessive behavior is that people would choose an altered state of consciousness that's toxic and ostensibly destroys most aspects of your normal life, because for a brief moment you feel okay.

If your addiction lingers, ask yourself if you really want to release it, because in your heart you do not.

Music is my personal addiction. So much of everything I've done has only been to open more doors for the music itself. It all gets back to the fact that I am, first of all, a songwriter and a singer.

I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.

Most memoirs about alcoholism, promiscuity, and addiction are deep, sobering tales full of scars that will never heal and include alarming statistics and reflection about recovery.This is not one of those memoirs.

For a decade Americans have been steeped in the rhetoric of "zero tolerance" and the faith that virtually all problems from drug addiction to lousy teaching can be solved by pouring on the punishment. Even without a Commander in Chief who pledges to rid the world of evildoers, smoke them out of their holes and the like, we would be vulnerable to the temptation to brush aside frustrating complexities and relieve intolerable fear (at least for the moment) by settling on one or more scapegoats to crush. To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.

Even when we get what we addictively want, our wanting to keep things that way automatically creates a new addiction.

The abuse of food, alcohol, or drugs is essentially a material response to a need that isn't really physical at its foundation.. What we are looking for is pure joy rather than mere sensation, or even oblivion of sensation. Addiction is unrecognized spiritual craving.

As you feel increasingly comfortable around your friends, I think it's more than fine to share the basic details of your heroin addiction with them. If they seem receptive, you can feel free to talk about it in further detail; if they seem judgmental or uncomfortable, you can move on to other topics.

Whenever you feel upset, take full responsibility for the emotions that you are experiencing. Get to work as quickly as possible identifying the programming, or the addiction, that is leading you to reject what other people are saying or doing.

A Rescuer isn't always a person. Addictions to alcohol or drugs, sexual addiction, workaholism-all the ways we numb out-can rescue the Victim from feeling his or her own feelings.

Addiction beggins whith the hope that something 'out there' can instantly fill up the emptiness inside.

Addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue, and depression are all ways that we withhold our full participation in the program of life we are offered. When the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way.

I think in the end, you know, we're just addicted to oil. We've got to overcome that addiction, and we need some serious accountability of big oil, because big oil, like so much of big businesses, has just colonized our government, colonized the regulatory agencies so we can't impose any kind of accountability on them.

Golf is a terrible, hopeless addiction, it seems: it makes its devotees willing to trudge miles in any manner of weather, lugging a huge, incommodious and appallingly heavy bag with them, in pursuit of a tiny and fantastically expensive ball, in a fanatical attempt to direct it into a hole the size of a beer glass half a mile away. If anything could be better calculated to convince one of the essential lunacy of the human race, I haven't found it.

It's not just that we all as individuals should reevaluate our relationship with our devices - maybe you should, on a personal level - but in terms of balancing the micro and the macro and the personal and the structural, it's actually a bigger issue than you and your phone addiction.

Breaking America's oil addiction would not lead to a future of sackcloth and ashes.

There is no reason to think today's levels of [drug] addiction are anywhere near the levels that would be reached under legalization.

The only cure for addiction is spiritual.

There's 1,000 ways into addiction 1,000 ways out.

When someone tells me that they insist on having drinks with me, and there are some cultures where sealing the deal or celebrating or having a guest in the home, it is very traditional to slam down a couple shots or whatever the local grog is. I just tell them I'm allergic, which is not a lie, you know alcoholism and drug addiction in many ways are described as an allergy of the body and the mind. So I just tell them I'm allergic and they're like, "Oh, no problem."

These disorders - schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, depression, addiction - they not only steal our time to live, they change who we are.

Feel the wounded heart that's underneath the addiction, self-loathing, or anger.

There is so much to life; my heart breaks watching someone held captive by addiction.

I have a little bit of an addiction to work. So I'm always hiding in the bathroom with my Blackberry to work when I'm on holiday.

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.

Pomegranate juice has staying power. It's not a fad. Once people have tasted POM Wonderful, they say they are addicted - and it's a good addiction to have.

Knowledge is an addiction, as drink; knowledge does not bring understanding. Knowledge can be taught, but not wisdom; there must be freedom from knowledge for the coming of wisdom.

Addiction is a revolt of the soul.

My major vice is sarcasm with a side of caffeine addiction.

A "snapshot" feature in USA Today listed the five greatest concerns parents and teachers had about children in the '50s: talking out of turn, chewing gum in class, doing homework, stepping out of line, cleaning their rooms. Then it listed the five top concerns of parents today: drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, suicide and homicide, gang violence, anorexia and bulimia. We can also add AIDS, poverty, and homelessness. . . . Between my own childhood and the advent of my motherhood--one short generation--the culture had gone completely mad.

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.

Because they are human beings, addicts long for wholeness, for fulfillment, and for the final good that believers call God. Like all idolatries, addiction taps this vital spiritual force and draws off its energies to objects and processes that drain the addict instead of fulfilling him.

It is hard to understand addiction unless you have experienced it.

The pervasive brutality in current fiction - the death, disease, dysfunction, depression, dismemberment, drug addiction, dementia, and dreary little dramas of domestic discord - is an obvious example of how language in exploitative, cynical or simply neurotic hands can add to the weariness, the darkness in the world.