Drinking: A Love Story Quotes
"I drank when I was happy and I drank when I was anxious and I drank when I was bored and I drank when I was depressed, which was often."
"My mother found that bottle, empty, that April, the day of my father’s funeral."
"The next day she asked me to take a walk with her on the beach... 'I need to talk to you. I’m very worried about your drinking.'"
"I told her I’d look into Alcoholics Anonymous... 'In the meantime I’ll cut down. Two drinks a day. No more than that. I promise.'"
"It’s about passion, sensual pleasure, deep pulls, lust, fears, yearning hungers. It’s about needs so strong they’re crippling."
"I loved the way drink made me feel, and I loved its special power of deflection."
"The relationship is just there... then you wake up one morning and some indefinable tide has turned forever and you can’t go back."
"Alcohol had become too important. By the end it was the single most important relationship in my life."
"I never drank in the morning and I never drank at work, and except for an occasional mimosa or Bloody Mary at a weekend brunch, I always abided by them."
"I look in the mirror sometimes and think, What happened?"
"Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air."
"Do you find yourself having a drink or two before you go to a party where you know alcohol will be served, just to 'get yourself in the mood'?"
"Enough? That’s a foreign word to an alcoholic, absolutely unknown. There is never enough, no such thing."
"The knowledge that some people can have enough while you never can is the single most compelling piece of evidence for a drinker to suggest that alcoholism is, in fact, a disease."
"I suppose that’s an intellectual way of describing that brand of fear, and the instinctive response that accompanies it: there’s a sense of deep need, and the response is a grabbiness, a compulsion to latch on to something outside yourself."
"People talk about their fixations with things—a new house they’re looking to buy, or a job they’re desperate for, or a relationship—as though these things have genuinely transformative powers."
"But drinking was so much more effective, its comfort so much more reliable."
"It’s not at all unusual in AA to hear people refer to alcohol as a best friend, and to mean that on the most visceral level."
"Drinking alone is enormously self-protective, at least in theory. The solitude relieves you of human contact, which can feel burdensome to even the most gregarious alcoholic."
"The amazing thing, of course, is that you do all this—all this drinking, all the keeping of secrets and withholding of information, all the self-medicating—without making the connection between the drink and the outcome."
"You have to sexualize the relationship in order to feel powerful, and you have to drink in order to feel sexual, and on some level you understand it’s all fake, that the power is chemical, that it doesn’t come from within you."
"When you drink, you can’t make the distinction between getting through painful feelings and getting away from them."
"The armor, of course, is protection from all the things we might actually feel, if we allowed ourselves to feel at all."
"Without liquor I’d feel like a trapped animal, which is why I always had it."
"As soon as I got home, I’d crack open the first beer and drink it with a deep relief."
"The drink defused that explosive feeling, numbed the self-awareness."
"The paradoxical thing about drinking alone—the insidious thing, really—is that it creates an illusion of emotional authenticity which you can see as false only in retrospect."
"I used to feel that way on Sunday mornings, when I’d wake up alone in the apartment with nothing before me but unstructured time."
"In its last stage, alcoholism can kill: heavy and chronic drinking can harm virtually every organ and system in the body."
"Denial can make your life feel full of risk and adventure, sparkling and dynamic as a rough sea under sunlight."
"For years I could see that truth in other people, but not in myself."
"Drinkers know each other; we can pick each other out of a crowd the way new mothers can, or army veterans."
"A light bulb goes on and then—click!—just like that, it goes off again and you’re back in the dark, unable to see."
"Always, she used drugs and alcohol toward that end, drinking and snorting her way into an altered state of being."
"Julian was an art dealer, urbane and cerebral and yet sensual, too, a man who appreciated fine things."
"Of course, attaching all your hopes and fantasies to something—or someone—outside yourself almost always has disastrous results."
"Julian seemed like someone who had access to all the things I wanted and felt I lacked in my own life—a worldliness, a confidence."
"I remember standing in his living room one day watching him iron a shirt and having the thought that he would change my life."
"Events like that were irrefutable pieces of evidence to me, indications that all around me people were getting on with their lives while I seemed to stand still, immobile."
"I wanted to lie down on my parents’ front lawn and die."
"Julian was right, of course—we shouldn't have been living together, we were making each other miserable."
"I felt powerless with Julian, and so I drank, and the drinking created another feeling of power, a false one, perhaps, but the only one I had access to."
"Over the years I have learned to detest the phrase low self-image. What do these mean, low self-image and self-esteem?"
"I still believe the liquor was a genuine support, a crutch I simply couldn’t have managed without."
"On April 7, 1993, exactly one year after my father’s death, I called my mother and asked her how she was feeling about him."
"Much of this effort had been reflected in her work: the summer after he died, she painted a collage called 'Atlantis,' about a false world under the sea."
"One week after that conversation, my mother woke up with pain in her ribs and stomach so intense she couldn’t lean over to tie her shoes."
"My mother was sixty-five. She said, 'I’m not so old that I’m ready to give up.'"
"Halfway through lunch I took my wineglass and went into the bedroom to check on my mother."
"I can picture myself sitting in the living room several hours after my mother’s funeral, so loaded I could barely keep my eyes open."
"I still called it a 'drinking problem'; I couldn’t make the leap to alcoholism because that was too great an admission, far too final."
"Then I pulled into the driveway of a total stranger and pounded crazily on the door."
"My mother’s last words to me were 'Stop smoking.'"
"Stop smoking. I think she meant: Stop suffering. Stop being so self-destructive. Stop killing yourself."
"You can be so lucky for only so long, and at some point it dawns on you that you are the only one capable of orchestrating your own future."
"My life could go on and on and on like that, just as my father’s had."
"I thought about the work he’d never finished. He’d started writing a book about emotion before he got sick, and he never really got past the first chapter."
"I thought about his words to me: 'This is all a giant procrastination and you must deal with it. You must.'"
"Insight," he said, "is almost always a rearrangement of fact."
"Fact One: I drank too much. Fact Two: I was desperately unhappy."
"My father said something else in the first weeks after his diagnosis that had stuck with me, one of his pronouncements that seemed to come out of the blue."