62 Quotes On Alcoholism

Alcoholism is a complex and often misunderstood condition that affects millions of people worldwide. It's a journey marked by challenges, courage, and sometimes, redemption. Whether you're seeking understanding, encouragement, or simply a bit of insight, quotes can offer a powerful connection to the experiences of others. In this collection, we've curated 62 thought-provoking quotes on alcoholism that encapsulate a range of perspectives — from the struggle and pain to the hope and recovery. We hope these words resonate with you, offering comfort, awareness, and perhaps even a spark of inspiration.

1. “Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other.” - Tennessee Williams

2. “But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius.” - Truman Capote

3. “Karl Marx: "Religion is the opiate of the masses."Carrie Fisher: "I did masses of opiates religiously.” - Carrie Fisher

4. “A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.” - Raymond Chandler

5. “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

6. “I'm sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, "Yeah, but studies say kids can buy drugs more easily than they can buy alcohol." To which I always respond, "I guess that means you keep heroin in your liquor cabinet?” - Koren Zailckas

7. “Those unexpected morality lessons provided by the trip had jolted me into some kind of action. It was time to jettison the past before the present jettisoned me. This was my first veiled attempt at recovery. Although perhaps I was just running away again. I returned to Glasgow, planning to say a final goodbye to Anne and get out of her life, but ended up drinking with buddies in the Chip Bar and never seeing her. I called her instead to say I was moving to London and told her she could have the house and everything else we owned, which wasn't much. I think she was as relieved as I was that I was leaving town for good.” - Craig Ferguson

8. “Alcohol ruined me financially and morally, broke my heart and the hearts of too many others. Even though it did this to me and it almost killed me and I haven't touched a drop of it in seventeen years, sometimes I wonder if I could get away with drinking some now. I totally subscribe to the notion that alcoholism is a mental illness because thinking like that is clearly insane.” - Craig Ferguson

9. “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

10. “I had lived in fear of the fabled terrifying visions that assail chronic drinkers, but which had not yet attacked me.” - Craig Ferguson

11. “Whether I or anyone else accepted the concept of alcoholism as a disease didn't matter; what mattered was that when treated as a disease, those who suffered from it were most likely to recover.” - Craig Ferguson

12. “I found the prospect daunting, but somehow comforting, too, because the counselors insisted it could be done, and, after all, many of them were recovering alcoholics themselves.” - Craig Ferguson

13. “Some things just couldn't be protectd from storms. Some things simply needed to be broken off...Once old thing were broken off, amazingly beautiful thing could grow in their place.” - Denise Hildreth

14. “Hitch: making rules about drinking can be the sign of an alcoholic,' as Martin Amis once teasingly said to me. (Adorno would have savored that, as well.) Of course, watching the clock for the start-time is probably a bad sign, but here are some simple pieces of advice for the young. Don't drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food. Don't drink if you have the blues: it's a junk cure. Drink when you are in a good mood. Cheap booze is a false economy. It's not true that you shouldn't drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain. Hangovers are another bad sign, and you should not expect to be believed if you take refuge in saying you can't properly remember last night. (If you really don't remember, that's an even worse sign.) Avoid all narcotics: these make you more boring rather than less and are not designed—as are the grape and the grain—to enliven company. Be careful about up-grading too far to single malt Scotch: when you are voyaging in rough countries it won't be easily available. Never even think about driving a car if you have taken a drop. It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't ever be responsible for it.” - Christopher Hitchens

15. “Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.'All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was:There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man!Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.” - Christopher Hitchens

16. “The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.” - Robert Frost

17. “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

18. “John Barleycorn's inhibition rises like a wall betweenone's immediate desires and long-learned morality.” - Jack London

19. “One day at a time, sweet Jesus. Whoever wrote that one hadn’t a clue. A day is a fuckin’ eternity” - Roddy Doyle

20. “To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.” - Caroline Knapp

21. “It's like a switch, clickin' off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there's peace.” - Tennessee Williams

22. “When you quit drinking you stop waiting.” - Caroline Knapp

23. “Perhaps people felt there was nothing more they could do, you know? After all, how can someone be helped who doesn’t see the need? A Christian counselor I saw for a while described such situations as, “a White Elephant everyone can see but no one wants to deal with; everyone hopes the problem will just go away on its own.” Just like with my mom. Back then it seemed women were almost expected to go a little loopy sometimes. After all we’re the ones with raging hormones that get out of whack – by our periods, PMS or pregnancy and childbirth – and cause craziness and bizarre behavior. And because of those uncontrollable hormones, women are also more emotional and predisposed to depression. These are things my mom was actually told by her parents, her family, her husbands and friends... even her doctor. Eventually, she made herself believe that her erratic behavior stemmed from PMS, not mania or alcohol.” - Chynna T. Laird

24. “There's nothing inherently interesting about being a drunk -- in fact, quite the contrary.” - Heather King

25. “It was your choice to sleep with her Gavin! It didn't just happen!” - Belinda G. Buchanan

26. “Some lurid things have been said about me—that I am a racist, a hopeless alcoholic, a closet homosexual and so forth—that I leave to others to decide the truth of. I'd only point out, though, that if true these accusations must also have been true when I was still on the correct side, and that such shocking deformities didn't seem to count for so much then. Arguing with the Stalinist mentality for more than three decades now, and doing a bit of soapboxing and street-corner speaking on and off, has meant that it takes quite a lot to hurt my tender feelings, or bruise my milk-white skin.” - Christopher Hitchens

27. “There's not alcoholic in the world who wants to be told what to do. Alcoholics are sometimes described as egomaniacs with inferiority complexes. Or, to be cruder, a piece of shit that the universe revolves around.” - Anthony Kiedis

28. “And in my mind, this settles the issue. I would never drink cologne, and am therefore not an alcoholic.” - Augusten Burroughs

29. “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

30. “The description of Huck’s father grabbed my full attention, and I glanced up at the book in my teacher’s hand as if to double check. My eyes bulged reflexively. Huck’s father was an abusive drunk just like mine. The boy was hopeful that a corpse found near the river was actually his dad, but it turned out not to be. It was spooky how high my hopes rose for the boy, and then sank so utterly low when the body was discovered to be a female in disguise. I should’ve mourned for the woman, but it was the boy I felt bad for.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

31. “My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.” - Ernest Hemingway

32. “If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!” - Robert Louis Stevenson

33. “I felt empty and sad for years, and for a long, long time, alcohol worked. I’d drink, and all the sadness would go away. Not only did the sadness go away, but I was fantastic. I was beautiful, funny, I had a great figure, and I could do math. But at some point, the booze stopped working. That’s when drinking started sucking. Every time I drank, I could feel pieces of me leaving. I continued to drink until there was nothing left. Just emptiness.” - Dina Kucera

34. “There are millions of people out there who live this way, and their hearts are breaking just like mine. It’s okay to say, “My kid is a drug addict or alcoholic, and I still love them and I’m still proud of them.” Hold your head up and have a cappuccino. Take a trip. Hang your Christmas lights and hide colored eggs. Cry, laugh, then take a nap. And when we all get to the end of the road, I’m going to write a story that’s so happy it’s going to make your liver explode. It’s going to be a great day.” - Dina Kucera

35. “What would you rather have?""Cheeseburger and a small fry. Coke classic. Better yet, dope classic.""Sure. I'll take a milkshake. What's the special flavor this week, chocolate Jack Daniels?""Strawberry scotch.""Stick one of those paper umbrellas in mine.""Shove a syringe in mine. And a plastic tombstone. RIP, baby. He was born a rock star. He died a junkie.""Rock in peace."[...]"He wanted the world and lost his soul. [...] Sold it all for rock and roll. Lost his heart in a needle. Found his life in the grave. The road to hell is paved in marijuana leaves. Now he rocks in peace.” - L.F. Blake

36. “Liver failure is the easiest way to say 'no' to alcohol.” - Bauvard

37. “Logan couldn’t remember when a few drinks became a bottle and then two bottles every night. He couldn’t point to one single moment or event as the cause. From his first drink at fourteen, alcohol began soaking into his skin, the moisture rotting him on the inside. Every few years he’d use a chisel to hack away all the wet, unsound wood without trying to find the source of the moisture. The rot always came back, stronger than before.” - JD Ruskin

38. “Un uomo intelligente a volte è costretto a ubriacarsi per passare il tempo tra gli idioti.” - Ernest Hemingway

39. “Gwynn, she was always talking about wanting to be drunk and honestly I did want to encourage that, I wanted to go to a bar with her and let all the stuff sobriety pushed down be released so I could catch it in my palms and finally kiss her. She was just so sad. Melancholy was a fleshy wave permanently cresting on her face, she had to speak through it when she talked.” - Michelle Tea

40. “Kate was about to protest when something caused her to look in her mother’s direction. She was standing statue-like in front of the television with that brave, painted-on smile. Then Kate realized what had caught her attention: her mother’s tear-filled eyes were reflecting the on-off motion of the blinkers like a watery mirror. Kate stared transfixed at the flashing points of light that betrayed her mother’s pain. The urge to tell her father how much she wanted him to be proud of her and how much he had hurt her, faded in the dark depths of her mother’s eyes.” - Sabrynne McLain

41. “I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one-half his days and mad the other.” - Anne Brontë

42. “Alcoholism or addiction is a disease because it fits the definition of disease. It is progressive and chronic, and left untreated, it will kill.” - Irene Tomkinson

43. “The booze makes you a liar and the lies you tell yourself are the biggest.” - JD Ruskin

44. “...gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)” - Barbara Blatner

45. “I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)” - Barbara Blatner

46. “oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)” - Barbara Blatner

47. “Alcoholism is a Curse” - honeya

48. “Blackouts can be fun if approached with the right mindset. You just can't sweat the fact that you've lost a small portion of your life for all eternity. Occasionally, little bubbles of memory will float up like surreal Mylar party balloons at unexpected times throughout the net day and start piecing together a colorful, if incomplete, version of reality.” - Josh Kilmer-Purcell

49. “I was never afraid of anything because I never hurt anyone. I was always an old drunk.[Mexico City concert, June 2011]” - Chavela Vargas

50. “She'd either be a heartless mother and wife or a spineless enabler, when all she really wanted was the man she'd once believed him to be.” - Nicholas Sparks

51. “I believe in 'Positives' not Negatives the only thing about Alcohol I'm Powerless over is those Damn Taxes” - Stanley Victor Paskavich

52. “No one can practice the precepts perfectly, including the Buddha... Boiled vegetables contain dead bacteria. We cannot practice the First Precept or any of the precepts perfectly. But because of the real danger in our society--alcoholism has destroyed so many families and has brought about much unhappiness--we have to do something. We have to live in a way that will eradicate that kind of damage. That is why even if you can be very healthy with one glass of wine every week, I still urge you with all my strength to abandon that glass of wine (76).” - Thich Nhat Hanh

53. “Spurred by Amy’s death I’ve tried to salvage unwilling victims from the mayhem of the internal storm and am always, always just pulled inside myself.” - Russell Brand

54. “What was so painful about Amy’s death is that I know that there is something I could have done. I could have passed on to her the solution that was freely given to me. Don’t pick up a drink or drug, one day at a time. It sounds so simple; it actually is simple but it isn’t easy; it requires incredible support and fastidious structuring.” - Russell Brand

55. “It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing? Would Great Ormond Street be so attractive a cause if its beds were riddled with obnoxious little criminals that had “brought it on themselves?” - Russell Brand

56. “The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope.” - Russell Brand

57. “I sit there and think how it isn't fair that I can't drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinking into a decade of hard-core drinking and that is why. I blew my wad.” - Augusten Burroughs

58. “And you know what the worst thing was?The worst thing was that nobody ever believed how hard we tried.” - Jack McCarthy

59. “I mean, that's at least in part why I ingested chemical waste - it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column read.I used to refer to my drug use as putting the monster in the box. I wanted to be less, so I took more - simple as that. Anyway, I eventually decided that the reason Dr. Stone had told me I was hypomanic was that he wanted to put me on medication instead of actually treating me. So I did the only rational thing I could do in the face of such as insult - I stopped talking to Stone, flew back to New York, and married Paul Simon a week later.” - Carrie Fisher

60. “He panted over me, winded by his own absurd lecture. The stench of his alcoholic breath stung my nose. Again I didn’t answer. I hoped he’d tire out and end his speech and hobble back to the living room without touching me. Such hopes were unlikely, as was the case this time. “Answer me, you good-for-nuthin’ wench!” The pain bit instantly as his hand connected with my cheek. I shook my head in answer to his crazy questions, feeling a rise of warm tears.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

61. “This is the point where the knowing, irony-infused author laughs along with his readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity Kool-Aid. That's some other book. Slogans saved my life. All of them--the dumb ones, the preachy ones, the imperatives, the cliches, the injunctives, the gooey, Godly ones, the shameless, witless ones.” - David Carr

62. “[C]ivilians are equally bewildering to the addict. I've watched people drink a glass and a half of wine and push away the rest. What exactly is the point of that?” - David Carr