Page 5 I loved the way drink made me feel, and I loved its special power of deflection, its ability to shift my focus away from my own awareness of self and onto something else, something less painful than my own feelings.
Page 41 Over the years I’ve come to think of memories as tiny living things, microorganisms that swim through the brain until they’ve found the right compartment in which to settle down and rest. If the compartment isn’t available, if there’s no proper label for the memory, it takes up residence somewhere else, gets lodged in a corner and gnaws at you periodically, cropping up at odd times, or in dreams.
Page 58 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, that it has powerful physiological roots, that the alcoholic’s body simply responds differently to liquor than a nonalcoholic’s.
Page 65 Many of us drink in order to take that flight, in order to pour ourselves, literally, into new personalities: uncap the bottle, pop the cork, slide into someone else’s skin. A liquid makeover, from the inside out.
Page 93 I smiled demurely at all the right moments, maintained the right amount of eye contact, cultivated that particular ego-stroking blend of vulnerability, reverence, and detachment.
Page 106 Recovering alcoholics often talk about drinking “the way they wanted to” when they were alone, drinking without the feeling of social restraint they might have had at a party or in a restaurant. There’s something almost childlike about the need, and about the language we use to describe it: wanting our bottles, wanting to crawl into that dark room in our minds and curl up and be alone with our object of security.
Page 115 The rituals, the little routines, that alcoholics use to break the drinking into segments and minimize its visibility are very preoccupying. You buy, you edge home with your large brown bag, you lock the door behind you, and only then can you relax. All that planning takes energy.
Page 240 “Insight,” he said, “is almost always a rearrangement of fact.”
Page 255 I wanted that wine so badly I could taste it, and the only thing that kept me from rushing out to the liquor store to buy a bottle was the understanding that as soon as I drank the first glass, I’d be obsessing about the next one, and the next and the next and the next. I would not drink one glass; I would drink—and obsess about—one bottle, possibly more. That’s the only option at times like that, to think past the first glass, to think it through. You’ve never had “just one drink” in your life.
Page 271 When you question your alcoholism, you say to yourself: If I am an alcoholic, I shouldn’t drink and if I’m not an alcoholic, I don’t need to. That’s a nice piece of logic. You say: People who aren’t alcoholics do not lie in bed at two-thirty in the morning wondering if they’re alcoholics. A good reality check.
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