Quotes about addiction

“A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is "sensitive"; or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture — in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.”

“I'm addicted to perfection. Problem with my life is I was always also addicted to chaos. Perfect chaos.”

“My mom and I lived at Hollywood and Western, a drug-dealer and prostitute corner. It was pretty terrifying. I got beat up a lot. I saw people have sex in the alleys. I remember I was five years old, and this guy with a trench coat, needles and crack cornered me. Early on, seeing the devastation on my block, seeing heroin addicts, made me think twice about ever getting involved in drugs. It's evil. Once you take that step and experiment, drugs can take over your life. You are not yourself anymore. That's something I never wanted. I didn't have a lot of friends growing up. It was kind of just me and my parents. But because of them, the neighborhood did not have a bad effect on me. My dad introduced me to artists, and every few months we'd go to some hippie doo-dah parade as Mudmen in our underwear, carrying sticks and covered in mud. My mother did everything to get me into the best schools she could find.”

“Don't let these tattoos fool you. I'm straight edge. I'm a man of great discipline; I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't do drugs… my addiction is wrestling - my obsession is competition. Discipline. My name is C…M…Punk.”

“Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is. They are addicts, and they are guilty and they do lie and cheat and steal — like all junkies.”

“Lust hidden under the cloak of the secretly forbidden, is explosive and addictive.”

“Then, there is the secret life.
There, alone and in our own realm;
Here, we fantasize about sex, romance,
and being wealthy. No one knows.
Except, when we cross over
and violate societal mores. We betray,
experience relationships that would be scorned
in the other two lives. And to the extent we deviate
from the norms, the greater amount of time
is expended for clandestine pursuits.
And we stay here, because it’s addictive.”

“She had her addictions and one of them was reading.”

“I never met an addict who came from a nice home. I've met addicts that came from families that had money and nice houses. But never from a nice home.”

“The alcoholic and the drug addict harm only themselves by their behavior; the person who violates the rules of morality governing mans life in society harms not only himself, but everyone.”

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.”

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

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”

“Music is an addiction.”

“Addictions - Run to Jesus instead of running to your addiction.”

“The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”

“[On Sid Vicious] Yes I can take on England, but I couldn't take on one heroin addict.”

“Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.”

“Americans need bullshit the way koala bears need eucalyptus leaves. They’ve become totally addicted to it. They get so much of it back home that they can’t survive without it.”

“I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.”

“Serenity is the first thing people with addiction issues are instructed to request: God, grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.”

“Voices were blended and intermingled in a tumultuous swirl around which eddied laughter, shouts, the squeaking of doors and windows, piano and accordion music, rollicking handclaps, a policeman's bark, braying, grunts, coughs of hashish addicts and screams of drunkards, anonymous calls for help, raps of a stick, and singing by individuals and groups.”

“I'm like a junky without an addiction.”

“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.”

“MALCOLM X: Freedom, justice and equality are our principal ambitions. And to faithfully serve and follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is the guiding goal of every Muslim. Mr. Muhammad teaches us the knowledge of our own selves, and of our own people. He cleans us up--morally, mentally and spiritually--and he reforms us of the vices that have blinded us here in the Western society. He stops black men from getting drunk, stops their dope addiction if they had it, stops nicotine, gambling, stealing, lying, cheating, fornication, adultery, prostitution, juvenile delinquency. I think of this whenever somebody talks about someone investigating us. Why investigate the Honorable Elijah Muhammad? They should subsidize him. He's cleaning up the mess that white men have made. He's saving the Government millions of dollars, taking black men off of welfare, showing them how to do something for themselves. And Mr. Muhammad teaches us love for our own kind. The white man has taught the black people in this country to hate themselves as inferior, to hate each other, to be divided against each other. Messenger Muhammad restores our love for our own kind, which enables us to work together in unity and harmony. He shows us how to pool our financial resources and our talents, then to work together toward a common objective. Among other things, we have small businesses in most major cities in this country, and we want to create many more. We are taught by Mr. Muhammad that it is very important to improve the black man's economy, and his thrift. But to do this, we must have land of our own. The brainwashed black man can never learn to stand on his own two feet until he is on his own. We must learn to become our own producers, manufacturers and traders; we must have industry of our own, to employ our own. The white man resists this because he wants to keep the black man under his thumb and jurisdiction in white society. He wants to keep the black man always dependent and begging--for jobs, food, clothes, shelter, education. The white man doesn't want to lose somebody to be supreme over. He wants to keep the black man where he can be watched and retarded.”

“All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.”

“In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.”

“Recently, while I was in the street, my eye was caught by a poulterer's shop; I stared unthinkingly at his piled-up wares, neatly and appetizingly laid out, when I became aware of a man at the side busily plucking a hen, while another man was just putting his hand in a cage, where he seized a live hen and tore its head off. The hideous scream of the animal, and the pitiful, weaker sounds of complaint that it made while being overpowered transfixed my soul with horror. Ever since then I have been unable to rid myself of this impression, although I had experienced it often before. It is dreadful to see how our lives—which, on the whole, remain addicted to pleasure—rest upon such a bottomless pit of the cruellest misery! This has been so self-evident to me from the very beginning, and has become even more central to my thinking as my sensibility has increased … I have observed the way in which I am drawn in the [direction of empathy for misery] with a force that inspires me with sympathy, and that everything touches me deeply only insofar as it arouses fellow-feeling in me, i. e. fellow-suffering. I see in this fellow-suffering the most salient feature of my moral being, and presumably it is this that is the well-spring of my art.”

“Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.”

“Monks, these two extremes ought not to be practiced by one who has gone forth from the household life. (What are the two?) There is addiction to indulgence of sense-pleasures, which is low, coarse, the way of ordinary people, unworthy, and unprofitable; and there is addiction to self-mortification, which is painful, unworthy, and unprofitable. Avoiding both these extremes, the Tathagata (the Perfect One) has realized the Middle Path; it gives vision, gives knowledge, and leads to calm, to insight, to enlightenment and to Nibbana. And what is that Middle Path realized by the Tathagata? … It is the Noble Eightfold Path, and nothing else, namely: right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.”

“You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default.”

“My quarrel with the Catholic church is personal. You drug addicts, don’t harm bishops and cardinals because they are not involved in the political ruckus.”

“It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

“Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break.”

“If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected.”

“I'm a reading addict. I can't live without it, like someone who is addicted to drugs.”

“You've recognised a fundamental feature of an addict's life. Maintaining your habit is so important you've no real interest in anything else.”

“I’m obsessed and addicted and ripped-down-raw in love with Jericho Barrons.”

“Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.”

“Writing, at its heart, is a solitary pursuit, designed to make people depressoids, drug addicts, misanthropes, and antisocial weirdos.”

“In a dream I cannot see
tangled abstract phallacy
random turmoil builds in me
i'm a addicted to chaos
-Megadeth, Addicted to Chaos”

“Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.”

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

“I had someone at the Houston police station shoot me with heroin so I could do a story about it. The experience was a special kind of hell. I came out understanding full well how one could be addicted to 'smack,' and quickly.”

“Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.”

“Kids are like heroin, a little heroin addiction. When it’s bad, you’ve never been so miserable, but when it’s good you’ve never been so high.”

“Rose, I'm an addict with no work ethic who is likely going to go insane. I'm not like you. I'm not a super-hero."
"Not yet," I said.”

“That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people… That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.”

“Anyone who said power was not addictive had never really experienced it.”

“It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them.”

“A person susceptible to "wanderlust" is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.”

“I wish we didn't live so far apart… You're kind of addicting.”

“Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength. It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.”

“Among our egocentric sad-sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation.”

“The fact is that being seductive is an addiction that can never be satisfied.”

“Death,
I need my little addiction to you.
need that tiny voice who,
even as I rise from the sea,
all woman, all there,
says kill me, kill me.”

“We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.”

“He hadn't wanted to leave Emma, but at the same time he'd thought it would help. Like an addict getting away from the source of his addiction.”

“Boy poison - a boy's kisses were like a poison, which infected you and after you were exposed you craved more, like an addict.”

“I can't go long without you either, Eva. You're an addiction… my obsession…”

“If only it were that easy. You forget: I have an addictive personality. I'm addicted to you. Somehow I think you could do all sorts of bad things to me, and I'd still come back to you.”

“Once I was seated, I couldn't help people-watching. I'll admit it, I'm an addict from way back.”

“Some people bring out the worst in you, others bring out the best, and then there are those remarkably rare, addictive ones who just bring out the most. Of everything.”

“Help me give up my addiction to Hope.”

“Perfectionism is a self destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.”

“The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene”

“Her eyes winded. "I'm becoming addicted to you?."
He raised an eyebrow. "You say it like it's a bad thing.”

“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.”

“Good habits are as addictive as bad habits, and a lot more rewarding.”

“… most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.”

“Shame was an emotion he had abandoned years earlier. Addicts know no shame. You disgrace yourself so many times you become immune to it.”

“This must be what an addict feels like, I think,
trying to fight the pull of one last, quick read. My fingers itch toward the binding, and finally, with a sigh of regret, I just grab the book and open it, hungrily reading the story.”

“I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted.”

“I am obsessed with you, angel. Addicted to you. You're everything i've ever wanted or needed, everything i've dreamed of. You're everything. I live and breathe you. For you.”

“Addicts, as a group, generally score far above average o intelligence tests.
Why?
You tell me.
I guess maybe we're smart enough to have figured out how shitty things are and we decide addiction is the only way to deal with it.”

“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.”

“She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.”

“Owning a dog is slightly less expensive than being addicted to crack.”

“faith without doubt is addiction”

“There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. (107)”

“I am more than just a Serious basketball fan. I am a life-long Addict. I was addicted from birth, in fact, because I was born in Kentucky.”

“An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie to you. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.”

“Success is both an addiction and an enslavement…”

“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.”

“If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.”

“Now you know how I justify my addictions—if I can pay less for it than I would at Wal-Mart, I get to have it.”

“I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.”

“Fiction Is My Addiction”

“He remained heartbroken, which meant one of two things: either his love was pure and true and earthshakingly significant; or he was addicted to feeling forlorn, he liked being heartbroken.”

“There is nothing an addict likes more, or that serves as better pretext for continuing his present way of life, than to place the weight of responsibility for his situation somewhere other than on his own decisions.”

“Here is the real domino theory: Gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you.”

“The major obstacle and most difficult challenge in pursuit of a genuinely loving and caring relationship is to overcome the seductive powers and the addiction to the content approach to entering, creating, and maintaining it. The elusive golden thread of understanding lies in the how, and not the what. Specifically, as gender polarization in a relationship decreases, the experience of it improves. Without that rebalancing, even the most perfect content will unravel increasingly. Once the process is balanced, the magic of having ideal content is no longer necessary. The rebalancing process which creates a relationship free of polarizing gender defenses is clearly difficult and threatening initially in the same way that giving up an addiction seems to be. Once achieved however, a relationship free of distortion, false illusions, resentment, and hopelessness truly becomes possible.”

“I'd like to dedicate this song real quick, and I'm not going to say anything offensive so that we can make it on TV. This song isn't dedicated to drinking or drug addiction […]. It's basically about a walk in the park. This is something called 'Nightrain.”

“I am concerned that many young people in the Hemisphere seem to envision the United States as a nation intoxicated by power, addicted to warfare, controlled by a military-industrial complex, and determined to preserve the status quo, that we are against rapid economic and social growth.”

“There could be no negotiation between people who thought that cocaine was a vaguely naughty and salacious drug and the intravenous addict who know that it was an opportunity to experience the arctic landscape of pure terror.”

“Three grossly different types of stigma may be mentioned. First there are abominations of the body - the various physical deformities. Next there are blemishes of individual character perceived as weak will, domineering or unnatural passions, treacherous and rigid beliefs, and dishonesty, these being inferred from a known record of, for example, mental disorder, imprisonment, addiction, alcoholism, homosexuality, unemployment, suicidal attempts, and radical political behaviour. Finally there are the tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion, these being stigma that can be transmitted through lineages and equally contaminate all members of a family.”

“[Writing] is an addiction more powerful than alcohol, than nicotine, than crack. I could not conceive of not writing.”

“I think the original, 'They're the next Jane's Addiction' things that people said about us in the beginning have been pretty much wiped out.”