Quotes About Addiction

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.

[T]he truth is that drug addicts have a disease. It only takes a short time in the streets to realize that out-of-control addiction is a medical problem, not a form of recreational or criminal behavior. And the more society treats drug addiction as a crime, the more money drug dealers will make "relieving" the suffering of the addicts.

It was an addiction. A pointless, self-destructive addiction. But really, is there any other kind?

After a few years of the addiction controlling my online life, and beginning to affect my life offline as well - meeting men and becoming physically involved with them - whether I believed in God or not, to me was moot. Anything that had as much control over my life as this addiction did could not be healthy.

What is sex addiction? I asked a doctor and the guys goes, Sex addiction... People will end up doing something they don't want to do just for sex. Isn't that called a first date, man? If sex was the result of something I wanted to do, there'd be condoms all over my PlayStation.

My bulimia was my addiction. Hurting myself was my addiction... The music is what saved me. That's the only thing I can trust.

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.

The socio-economic impact of gambling addiction is comparable to drug and alcohol addiction

But I will say that the drugs are much more ferocious then they used to be. There are people wrecking their lives with addiction, which seems much more severe.

Sex addiction is a subject that should be discussed

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

Showing the addiction and unusual sexual practices are ways of just outlining a much bigger character trait.

Practically every environmental problem we have can be traced to our addiction to fossil fuels, primarily oil.

You really can't just take someone who's got a drug addiction and just put 'em in rehab. It doesn't work that way. You can't choose it for them. They have to choose it for themselves - because that's scary. It's really hard.

I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians.

My view of addiction, whether it's drugs, food, alcohol or any list of other things, is the same reason I asked my mother why I wasn't a drug addict or alcoholic, which is because when you're not loved, often people become an addict and self destructive. Now the opposite of love is indifference and even worse is rejection and abuse, and I meet those people.

Addiction has had such an impact on my life and the people I love, and there really is not a lot about it that is funny. So the last thing I wanted was to give the impression that it’s all fun and games, and isn’t it funny what she gets away with.

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.

It turns out that dopamine is a chemical on double duty in the brain. Along with its role in motor commands, it also serves as the main messenger in the reward systems, guiding a person toward food, drink, mates, and all things useful for survival. Because of its role in the reward system, imbalances in dopamine can trigger gambling, overeating, and drug addiction - behaviors that result from a reward system gone awry.

What my true addiction is is reading. I love to read. If I'd get too loaded, I couldn't remember the sentence I just read.

Addiction has the capacity to disconnect the human will and nullify moral agency. It can rob one of the power to decide.

It's almost an addiction that some people have to what I call the perfection that Hollywood presents of successful, beautiful, fun-loving people.

Tennis is an addiction that once it has truly hooked a man will not let him go.

Theodore Dalrymple is a brilliant observer of both medicine and society, and his book wittily engages with two versions of the current nonsense: orthodox medicine on drug addiction, and romantic poets on the wisdom you supposedly enjoy from getting high.

[While] my life started taking on all the problems of addiction. So that took me off into an area where relationships were absolutely impossible to handle on any real level. . . . Even communicating with other people was impossible.

Exercise is like an addiction. Once you're in it, you feel like your body needs it.

A staggering 63 percent of Americans say that addiction to alcohol or other drugs has had an impact on them at some point in their lives.

Too much of my family has messed with drugs. Addiction might be in my genes, so I ain't never tryin' it. It's something you can't control, and I don't like things I can't control. I worked too hard to have it taken away for something stupid. I ain't gonna be laughed at the way I used to laugh at those crackheads.

One of the problems we have is that we cannot just be content to admire and enjoy, we have to possess and feel we own what we see. That can become for many of us an addiction which adds a complication to our life and takes away our peace of mind. Craving things becomes after a while a serious distraction and an obsession.

Success is both an addiction and an enslavement.

For me, addiction comes down to basically where a pattern of behaviour has developed and that pattern of behaviour is becoming a very damaging cycle. It's sort of damaging your relationships, friends or lovers, it's damaging your own personal health and it's damaging for you and your workplace.

What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.

Have this Chet Baker movie coming out and in that situation, I went down the rabbit hole studying Chet Baker and being obsessed with the period and the music and the relationships and the dynamic, and everything, drug addiction. There was so much I wanted to get at to kind of get at the truth. With Regression, I was certainly in Alejandro's [Amenabar] hands.

Drugs are about dulling perception, about addiction and about behavioral repetition...What *psychedelics* are about is pattern- dissolving experiences of an extraordinarily high or different awareness. They are the exact opposite of drugs. They promote questioning , they promote consciousness, they promote value examinations, they promote the reconstruction of behavioral patterns.

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.

Music is a spiritual expression of what's in your heart. Music as a way of getting rich is a pretty new thing, and I often wonder if the mega-bucks glitzy atmosphere is making the quality of music suffer. You have to work really hard to get around that and remember why you're in it in the first place: because you have to be. It's like an addiction. You can't go a day without picking up your guitar. To me, the only commercial goals that are really valid are, 'Boy, I wish I didn't have to go to work. I wish I could do this all the time.'

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.

The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates.

The addiction isn't your problem - it is what you use to cope with your problem.

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.

Now there is apparently a causal link between heroin addiction and vegetarianism.

There's a very complex connection between crime and addiction, because a lot of people are committing crime to either fuel their drug habit, which they're going to do anyway, whether it's legal or not, or under the influence of drugs, which they're going to do more, if it's legal.

Racism is still America's greatest addiction. I also believe that America is the greatest sin against God.

Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story.

Even if I remember the first time perfectly, I don't remember the beginning at all. I mean: the beginning of addiction. It's hard to say when it becomes a problem; it sneaks up on you like a sun shower.

We are taught to consume. And that's what we do. But if we realized that there really is no reason to consume, that it's just a mind set, that it's just an addiction, then we wouldn't be out there stepping on people's hands climbing the corporate ladder of success.

Right now one in three teenagers meets the medical criteria for addiction, which is scary. I'm so driven because when I walked into rehab, I was like, "Am I still drunk? Did the guys give me the wrong address? Am I at a summer camp?" And it kills them. Deaths attributed to drugs and alcohol have overtaken all other emergency-room deaths.

Recovery is a bit like an addiction; you take it day by day. If you set yourself too many goalposts, you'll have problems.