"I could have been the first exporter of diarrhea from Scotland".
"Keep taking your butt to a meeting and eventually the mind will follow."
"I could have been the first exporter of diarrhea from Scotland".
"Keep taking your butt to a meeting and eventually the mind will follow."
"You know that we are a strange conglomerate of people. People who don't know nothin' about Alcoholics Anonymous look at us and think that somebody runs this Program. We run it."
"My sobriety is just having a grateful heart."
"I didn't come to AA because I had a bad weekend. I had a couple of bad decades. And for me, eventually, this becomes a matter of life and death."
"If God didn't give me more than I can handle, I wouldn't need God's help."
"If your new, 'help' is the dirtiest little four letter word in AA."
"Driven by 100 forms of fear boils down to five basic ideas: Abandonment, Rejection, Betrayal, Disrespect and Authority."
"I never took a step I didn't enjoy including the ninth one after I took the step."
"I think I was addicted to approval long before I was addicted to alcohol."
"Nothing says love like a restraining order."
"So, I have a body that cannot control my drinking, and a mind that cannot control my abstinence."
"I create chaos out there because I want the chaos out there to match the chaos in here because I can't keep this in here quiet."
"Not too many men like an angry prostitute but they are out there."
"I underestimated the opponent."
"This is a good idea."
"I wear my defects on my back where I can't see them."
"12 stomp women."
"Milledgeville, GA - The largest city of its size in the world."
"How many ominous warnings did I have?"
"Here's my card - call me up when you feel worse... A week later I called him up."
"Her pathology transferred into mine at a very early age."
"I am not here to water down AA but I have some news for ya'll, the landscape of AA has changed and there are very few real alcoholic kids anymore...I choose to call that untreated alcoholism."
"My life was a series of unfortunate events."
"Humility is nobility on its knees."
"Self-esteem? And I thought, 'Is that what this is about?' I thought it was just a bunch of people who got together and held onto each other for dear life so they wouldn't drink...I didn't know this was about all the things that were really wrong with me,"
"I just wanted to be with you more than anything else in the world."
"The only thing you can take back from the future is the fear."
"All the time I was looking for approval, I thought that was love. And love and approval are not the same thing, In point of fact ... When my parents were giving me all that disapproval, it was because they loved me."
"I don't have a drinking problem. When I drink I feel better."
"I was not a bad mother. I was an alcoholic who did bad mothering."
"I am responsible.
When anyone, anywhere
reaches out for help
I want the hand of AA
always to be there
and for that
I am responsible"
"It really wasn't racially mixed. It was just that the white people hadn't finished packing yet."
"We were having trouble with personal relationships, we couldn't control our emotional natures, we were a prey to misery and depression, we couldn't make a living, we had a feeling of uselessness, we were full of fear, we were unhappy, we couldn't seem to be of real help to other people ..."
"But it is from our twisted relations with family, friends, and society at large that many of us have suffered the most. We have been especially stupid and stubborn about them. The primary fact that we fail to recognize is our total inability to form a true partnership with another human being. Our egomania digs two disastrous pitfalls. Either we insist upon dominating the people we know, or we depend upon them far too much."
"I've yet to find anything wrong with sobriety."
"It is a bit much to ask a woman who has spent 30 years trying to hide her problem to get up here and tell all."
"Do you want to go to eternity with this soul?"
"I came in the door, and something happened."
"I have a deep, deep love for the old timers."
"I believe that the home group is the heartbeat of AA."
"I have always been much more impressed by what I see you do rather than what I hear you say. I have always had the ability to sound better than I really am...including tonight."
"They made the effort to leave their homes that night. They both came to my mother's house and talked to me about their drinking. They did not talk to me about 'my' drinking."
"Hope is a four letter word that I acquired in Alcoholics Anonymous and it means, H.O.P.E. - Hearing Other People's Experiences."
"If you do what you ought to do, you will survive. If you do what you want to do you won't survive."
"We can't be hateful and grateful at the same time."
"Don't drink, go to meetings and listen for the pop." Bob asked, "What pop?... The sound when your head comes out of your ass."
"People in their seats.
Voices of despair.
Obstacles to be beat.
Smoke fills the air.
How did it happen?
Stories to be told.
Listen attentively.
Their lives they unfold.
They gather together
With hope to be free.
They lean on each other
for that is the key.
Anonymous they remain
Each battling to sustain
Sobriety,
For that is their fame."
"I was maybe 42 years old before my mother told me she loved me, and looking back I can see why."
"The beauty of Alcoholocs Anonymous was that I didn't need to be any more than I was or know any more than I knew - God met me right where I was."
"But my sponsor told me the Fair comes around once a year and it lasts for two weeks."
"It is really a physical impossibility to do with that ship what I told that officer to do with it."
"We all come here from different roads but we follow that road of happy destiny together."
"I am not here to become a spiritual giant or a sweet heart...I am here to stay sober."
"God I don't want to be this way anymore...I believe I took the first three steps that night."
"The Steps were designed to heal not to hurt."
"Myself, I'm not a real big drinker. I like to have one or two. But, after that, I become a different person, and that guy really likes to drink."
"Seemingly I have had very little to do with the good that has come into my life."
"Today I have the ability to live peacefully, comfortably and joyously with myself and when I do that I have absolutely no difficulty living with you."
"I didn't spend five seconds on my related disorders."
"Now, thank God, the words 'as we understand Him', has no reference to understanding the infinite, thank God. It has reference only to the necessity for individual experience."
"Love in truth is possession but not the necessity to possess."
"I look over 28 years of drinking and I can't find one place in my entire drinking career where I could honestly say that liquor added anything to my well being....I was out of good drinking time before Alcoholics Anonymous was even born."
"So, I needed a sponsor, you know. Somebody I could call up and would say 'Oh, for God's sake Chuck, eat the cookies, drink the milk, take the nap and call me later.'"
"My life is mostly hearsay."
"True ambition is the profound desire to live usefully and walk humbly under the grace of God."
"The preposterous became palatable."
"I was burglarized and did not notice it for a few weeks."
"Children of alcoholics are pathetically cynical."
"How can I be doing the same thing my husband had done?"
"Fear made me excel at school."
"How come some alcoholics can stop drinking without AA and some have to go to AA?"
"That's what makes me an alcoholic: I can't drink, and I can't not drink."
"We are much more brothers and sisters in our defects than we have ever been in our virtues."
"If you use humility in life and if you ask for help and if you read the instructions and if you approach anything with any degree of humility you can accomplish things but I had no room in my life for instructions. That object lesson went right over my head."
"Alcoholics Anonymous has given me the gift of vision. I can see where I went astray. I can see where I was right, where I was wrong and when I didn't care at all."
"People out there think that Alcoholics Anonymous is for people to stop drinking. That's not true. It's for people who CAN'T stop drinking,"
"I have had near-death experiences drinking and near-death experiences sober, So, I have gotten to see God from both lenses. How lucky am I?"
"Is that true?"
"I have never had a bad day in AA. I've had bad moments. They were all my fault."
"To know reality, you must be Astonished."
"The basic benefit that this alcoholic received is my sanity...my sanity. And as a sane alcoholic I find I don't have to run anymore; I don't have to steal anymore and, you know, I don't have to sober up anymore."
"I got to the point where I would take one drink and I could not guarantee my behavior."
"People are gonna want to know 'How did you do that? How did you go 24 hours without drinking?'
The reason we ask you to read the Book is because we think that our Program lies between pages 'i' and 164 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous - that's where the factual material is on this Program and Alcoholics Anonymous is the basic text for our Program and that's where the truth is."
"...and you won't get opinion in the Book.... And we encourage you to get a sponsor because, you know, it's not easy finding your way around this place for a while. It took me a long, long time before I felt like I really understood what this Program was all about."
"I suppose to any normal person, that would be some kind of hint that there was something wrong in their life."
"I've always heard it said that Treatment is Discovery and AA is Recovery."
"The only psych wards I go in the past twelve and a half years is to take a meeting because I love psych wards!"
"...it was like a ray of sunshine and by that I mean she was yellow as a daffodil...with a willingness as a newcomer that you rarely see"
"But I have learned since then that if you're sober and your black and your 6'4" and you weigh 259 pounds you can have an opinion if you want to. You might not get invited back but you can have an opinion."
"If this thing is not working around your dinner table then it's not working around here either."
"But none of that matters. What matters is the fact that God gave me some gifts, he gave me some challenges, mind you, but he gave me some gifts and it's my responsibility to use those God given gifts to help further AA and insure that it is here for the suffering alcoholic in the future."
"Whatever could happen to me in there, it can't be worse than what is happening to me out here."
"When I came to Alcoholics Anonymous I was 30 years old and a mass of unrealized potential."
"My sponsor was like a doll with a pull string."
"I was determined that I was gonna show you fellows that here was one guy who could make it without God."
"but I had nothing of my own to take with me...and I became drunk."
"I really believe that my reason for staying sober is good sponsorship, the book of Alcoholics Anonymous and Sister Ignatia who I love very dearly and not to long ago I gave the eulogy at her Mass because I spent five years with her...She gave you dignity before you knew you had any dignity."
"Don gave generously of himself leaving a legacy of friendship and love to all friends of Dr. Bob."
"You're going to die if you don't do something about your drinking."
"Alcohol first takes what money can buy and then what money can't buy."
"When I don't drink no matter what, things get ugly really quick between my ears."
"I may or may not have been born alcoholic, but I was born weird."
"It was the worst gameshow in the world: What Will Happen to Don Tonight?"
"Every bottom has a trap door."
"There is no room for truth where the game of alcoholism is played."
"BE GRATEFULL!"
"Why am I the Pez Dispenser of resentments?"
"I was an evangelical agnostic."
"All my life I had phantom potential."
"My job is stitching, the pattern is up to God."
"So the slow burn kept growing and I started acting out you know, drinkin' alot and all that stuff, things that I do."
"I'm the kind of mom that neglected and abused and loved and cherished my kids all at the same time."
"I came into Alcoholics Anonymous and I would stay here until the pain of being sober was worse than the fear of getting drunk...and I did that for seven years...but I didn't get a sponsor and I didn't work the steps."
"Right now what we are looking for is the Big Chunks because this is not the last one you'll ever do."
"An unexamined life is not worth living."
"An unlived life is not worth examining."
"Our leaders are but twisted servants. They do not govern."
"Just desiring to stay sober won't get the job done."
"...Love and Service. We all know what love is and we all know what service is."
"I talked about uppers, they thought I was talking about teeth. I talked about dropping reds, they thought I was talking about killing communists."
"If I can get sober, anybody can get sober."
"I'd rather slow down and enjoy what's going on and do some spiritual work, too, than to just run around in an agitated frenzy."
"My go to reaction from high school through college up until coming into Alcoholics Anonymous was to flip it ...to go off the edge, to kamikaze into life....I basically wanted other people to take care of me...Super scared."
"I didn't want to get drunk all the time. I just wanted to get right."
"I was a designer one month; a car salesman the next."
"It was stupid of me to stay drunk all those years because I was a bastard and because I was black."
"I have a feeling, that if I should ever find myself in Heaven, I think it will be from backing away from Hell."
"The essence of belief is to look outside ourselves."
"Blessed are the lazy for they shall find their shortcuts."
"Self-esteem comes from doing esteemable acts."
"But Vietnam was not my problem. Fear was my problem, but I couldn't tell anybody."
"I did a lot of bad things over there that I am not proud of."
"Those who make it, act on the Grace of God - those who do not - wait for the Grace to act on them."
"I was thrown into AA."
"I am a product of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous."
"I am so, so grateful today to have a solution for what's wrong with me and for a long time I didn't know what's wrong with me and now I know that I'm an alcoholic and I suffer from alcoholism and because I know that, there is a solution for ALL of my problems today and it turns out that the solution is the same for all of my problems although for the last 21 years of my sobriety I keep thinking 'Maybe this time it's different?'"
"I drank with a funnel and a hose."
"I am free in every area of my life today as a result of Alcoholics Anonymous."
"Things stay in a place of regret until I can use that experience to help someone else or to use that experience to change something I'm going through."
"I was really such a victim. O, my heavens. All the counselors said so."
"And it wouldn't work for me because I was either too bad for AA or not bad enough."
"My story is not so much about a drunk-a-log. It's more of a think-a-log because my drinking career was very short and not sweet but what I talk about when I tell my story is what I felt versus what I did."
"I was born an alcoholic and my alcoholic thinking was a burden in my life from as long back as I can remember."
"The worst mistake you can make is to pay attention to the wrong people."
"I was taught early on in AA that gratitude is not a feeling; it's not and emotion; it's an action."
"Alcoholics are, by far, the most spiritual people I know...Every time an alcoholic takes a drink, they are trying to go home."
"Whatever you put in is what you are going to get out. I had to put recovery first."
"It was like somebody had lifted a weight off my shoulders. All of the sudden, you know, I was not alone anymore and there was something tangible wrong with me."
"They sold me a bill of goods that I think I have been buying ever since."
"Happiness is like a butterfly. The more you pursue it, the more it will elude you but if you stand quietly and let it happen, it will come and sit on your shoulder."
"I don't think living by principles is the problem. I think it's the principles we live by that's the problem."
"Icky was commissioned to blow up a certain pier in Houston Harbor, and he blew up the wrong one!"
"I was a misfit and now I fit ... and I know that this is the place I fit the best."
"My eyes for 26 years have watched miracles. My eyes have watched dead men get up and walk."
"I have a big inferiority complex. I started drinking in college to fit in. I drank too much for too long - I hurt myself mentally and I hurt myself physically. I knew I had a problem but I didn't know how to quit. It took Ridgeview [a local treatment facility] to show me how to quit and it took AA to show me there is life after alcohol."
"And I found that, you know, I would go to a party and I'd drink too much and pass out and I didn't even think about it. I didn't even think what was happening to my life, what was happening in my family, how my kids were getting out of hand - never dawned on me."
"My goal was not to drink like a gentleman. It was, like, leave me alone."
"I was at the mercy of whoever came along. In the beginning they were pretty nice people but by the end of my drinking they were as sick, or sicker than I was because I sought out sordid places... I was raised better than that but thumbed my nose at it because I couldn't live up to it."
"The more my drinking went on the lower I lowered my lines."
"I didn't know what I didn't know until I knew it."
"It all started with an admission that, in and of myself, I am not enough. This horrible, ego deflating, at the time, seemingly humiliating admission that would start me on a journey to freedom, and strength and courage."
"But I carried that shame and that secret around for years and years."
"I like to say that AA is like the Mafia, right? So, you can't talk about what you hear or see here or who is in here, but if you leave here, you die."
"Vintage Box
=========
I am living in a box held together with red clay. The clay is alcohol. It's holding me in this box. The clay is not sturdy. The clay crumbles and to keep the box together, I have to add the ugly clay. The clay is dirty and temporary. The clay leaves stains that are so hard to get out and it's so much harder to look at. When the rain comes, the clay washes away leaving a naked vulnerable box and the ugly red clay stains. The decision, time and time again, is to simply add more clay. It seems to be the only way to keep the box - my life - together. I am discovering a new way to remove the clay - alcohol. And this is the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. I will be painstaking about this process. I will take time and I will have to learn to deal with the clay stains. I will find comfort in knowing that some will eventually fade the stains, maybe not completely, but over time the box - my life - will have a little vintage look instead of the ugly dingy box that I see now. This cool vintage box - my life - will have an amazing story to it: how it was buried in the ugly red Georgia clay and now it is sought after by others who feel buried alive in their ugly clay - alcohol."
"On that date I checked myself into Decatur Hospital with a large bag of very inappropriate clothes...It hurt to look at myself in the mirror."
"I remember for my first three, four years of sobriety everything you said seemed to be such a contradiction of such and incredibly flimsy reed and this mysterious thing that almost seemed magical that worked when I did it and the power behind picking up cigarette butts, still mystifies me."
"Relapse does not have to be part of your story. It is a part of a lot of people's stories and it takes what it takes but I was just very lucky that when I got here, I was really, really ready."
"When I say I grew up in Alcoholics Anonymous, I mean I GREW UP in Alcoholics Anonymous."
"This disease progresses. It's gonna' get worse, worse and worser if you stay with it."
"Alcohol was telling me when to drink....Alcohol will take away everything good in your life."
"If there's a God up there, please let something happen."
"That was the most important prayer I ever said in my life."
"If you don't do something about this you're going to die."
"You know what an obsession is? It's a great, big thought. So big it pushes all the other thoughts out of your head and it says, for me, 'A drink would improve this situation. I don't care what the situation is, a drink would improve it'."
"I am a guy that absolutely could not quit drinking before I got to Alcoholics Anonymous.
I had a lot of well-intended people try to help me get sober - psychiatrists and preachers, high school principals, chief of police, a couple of deputy sheriffs, first sergeants, in-laws, parents, my brother - and no matter how hard they tried, I could never stay sober."
"To be standing here today amongst you, with love in my heart and a conviction that God, God is here, God is working and has entered my life and I am not that girl anymore. That says something about Alcoholics Anonymous."
"I am not as good as I look.".
He is a carpenter by trade with a bank balance of $312 dollars.
"I am just a drunk with a funny name... And I love AA and everything about it."
"If you cry a lot you won't have to pee so much."
"There is a difference between experiencing the abject misery of active alcoholism or the other which is the exquisite joy of sobriety. In my life I have experienced both of them."
"An Elder Statesman is just a Bleeding Deacon that ran out of blood and some of us are pretty damn anemic!"
"Don't get sick in AA."
"Stay around long enough to see the results of people who do not stay around long enough."
"As long as you know what you know, you'll never know. But when you begin to not do what we tell you not to do and to do what we tell you to do, then you will begin to know that you don't know then you'll begin to know."
"You can't keep it unless you pass it on."
"The only true Joy comes from the inside."
"The greatest thing we can have in this life is the 'me' that's inside us and this Program teaches us how to release that."
"Living with an absence of inner turmoil."
"You cannot act angry unless you first think angry."
"The most hurting and frustrating times of my life were those times when my own thoughts were my own worst enemies. I now begin each new day in joyous celebration because when I changed my thinking, I changed my entire life."
"The most hurting and frustrating times of my life were those times when my own thoughrs were my own worst enemies. I now begin each new day in joyous celebration because when I changed my thinking, I changed my entire life."
"Sobriety to me is not drinking a day at a time in absence of inner turmoil."
"My name is Jimmy and I am Powerless over Alcohol and I am extremely Grateful to be here."
"Life is now in session - Hot Damn - Get it On! ... Come on board!"
"And then I start drinking and I become this other person that I am so ashamed of."
"The common denominator is they relied on a Power greater than themselves and continue to carry the message of what my drinking was like, what happened to me and what my life is like now."
"We're getting wiped out, man. There is a big wave of heroin epidemic in this country. It's huge and if I were to come into AA today there is a good chance I'd probably be an alcoholic and a heroin addict...Being ignorant and naive I would have done it."
"A functioning alcoholic is like a paraplegic lap dancer. You might think you're bumping and grinding but only in your mind."
"I actually felt like I did before I came to Alcoholics Anonymous. I was suicidal, I wanted to die and yet I wasn't drinking."
"Looks like you are ready to take certain steps."
"I knew at a young age there was something different about me."
"I never could drink."
"On March 10, 1962 I just gave up on me."
"From the very beginning, my younger sister and I came from a lot of neglect. I was six and she was four when our mom left us alone to go to work at night. I don't remember a time when she woke up before two or three in the afternoon."
"It is not what I have done but what you have done for me."
"Three things about how it is today... The biggest change for me that has happened in life is that I have a life with a purpose...before it was all about self-gratification... Today I try to be a good person. The second thing is that I have a spiritual life...The more I do this the more the meditation becomes more and more important to me just shutting my eyes and listening...The third thing...acceptance is the key to all my problems."
"You know, they say, each of us is like angels with only one wing and the only way that we can fly is to embrace each other."
"After we come into A.A., if we go on growing, our attitudes and actions toward security -- emotional security and financial security -- commence to change profoundly. Our demand for emotional security, for our own way, had constantly thrown us into unworkable relations with other people."
"The end result is supposed to be an individual capable of some degree of self-responsibility. What we are supposed to be growing here is a grown up."
"It was really tough being the person that I was....I really did not know joy in my life."
"It's pretty hard to sit up there in the morning and give somebody 30 days for being drunk when you can't remember if you were with them the day before or not."
"I was a periodic drinker. The only time I got drunk is when I started to drink."
"The trouble with trouble is it starts out looking like fun."
"I was born a nasty two year old and remained that way until well into my thirties."
"... because if I could push you away from me soon enough then you wouldn't have the opportunity to hurt me. And that's what I was afraid of."
"And when it got really, really bad I decided that I had a problem and there was no help for me.And so I walked away; I walked away from everything. I called my youngest son's father and ask him to please take him, called my mother and asked her to please take my oldest son, they did and I walked away from everything. And I went and lived on the streets of Atlanta and I spent all day, every day, feeding my disease."
"I am proof you can live for a long time and not amount to a thing."
"AA was everything I thought I never wanted and everything I know I can't live without today."
"I knew to my toes that was alcoholic and I asked God to please help me."
"Nobody knew what I would do when I got there which made sense because I never knew..."
"Lookin' for love in all the wrong places...most of them drunk like I was."
"My husband says I'm alot like taking a drink out of a fire hose."
"This whole thing is about every moment of your life the undeniable Hand of God is in every moment of your life."
"The sixth Step is difficult to talk on because it is experiential."
"I think that a clear indicator that I had had a spiritual awakening of some kind was, like, when I thought a spiritual Program looked incredibly sexy on a man."
"So, alcoholism was my problem, however, my relief at this was very soon replaced by an annoyance because members suddenly felt the need to inform me that while I was not responsible for my alcoholism, I was responsible for my recovery."
"I sobered up when I was 36 years old and the miracle is that I have gradually turned into an adult."
"I went to the NCO Club and ordered a martini.
'How much is that?'
Well, it's 35 cents and your Marine Corps career.'
I said, 'Well that's not too much', so I paid it.
And then one day I went into a place and said,
'How about a fifth of that Scotch over there?
What do I owe you?',
'Well, it's $6 and your marriage',
'Well, doesn't seem unreasonable to me..."
"I felt like I was forced out on a balcony with no clothes on screaming out to the world, 'This is all there is!'"
"Too many years and not enough days."
"We are not only people who would not mix, we wouldn't even be invited."
"God doesn't fail!"
"It's much more important for me to remember that I am an alcoholic than it is for me to remember that I'm a woman."
"It's hard to be a nobody and have a somebody not pay attention to you."
"I was 23 years old and I had lost the ability to care about another human being and away I went to the penitentiary. Man, I got there and guess what? I got there and all my friends was there. Everybody from my old neighborhood was there. ..And I remember they said, 'Hey Larry, what took you so long?'"
"I was never scared enough not to pick up a drink ... today I am afraid not to be afraid of that first drink. That keeps me going at times in sobriety"
"Alcohol was not the solution for me. Alcohol was the relief for me. The 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are the Solution for me."
"I didn't pick that day. I would have picked a better day than that one. I would have picked Christmas or the Fourth of July or something like that but, you know, we don't get to do that here. You don't get to pick your sobriety date, you know. I picked a bunch of them. They just didn't take."
"Human life devalued to the price of a carton of cigarettes."
"If any of you are not married to an alcoholic, don't marry one. They're different."
"Dear Lord, some of us need to sing a new song. Will You teach us the words? Help us to sing in harmony with the Holy Spirit so our song will delight Your heart."
"I did not have a desire to stop drinking when I got here. There were alot of people in my life that had a desire for me to quit drinking, I just wasn't one of them."
"I knew I was an alcoholic before I got here but the problem was that the only one that I asked for help was myself."
"The first one you learn to forgive is yourself."
"...which is a pattern that remained with me throughout my drinking career and I felt ashamed and guilty and, oh my gosh, what did I do? And I couldn't wait to drink again."
"If only _____, then I would be happy"
"... and I supervised her with a drink in my hand. My outside circumstances are irrelevant. I drink because I'm an alcoholic and what makes me an alcoholic is - once I begin to drink, I cannot stop."
"And the miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous started for me that day."
"oozed into it over the course of 10 or 15 years."
"Everything that I wanted out of that marriage I got the exact opposite."
"I wasn't important enough for me to stay sober for...but when you told me, that if I stayed sober and I made myself an example and I made myself a good life, that somebody else could share in that good life, too, as a result of the help that I gave them. That just set me on fire!"
"Whatever the people in the group I was with espoused as their belief, I took as mine and it never occurred to me until I got to AA that I had a right to look inside, or responsibility to look inside, and decide what felt right to me."
"I knew nothing about living until I came into AA. The principles of the Steps go totally against my nature."
"I remember thinking, 'Life as I know it is over.'...And thank God it was."
"The four 'C's' really characterized my drinking. I drank in the beginning for comfort and then I drank for courage and then I crossed that line from controlled to uncontrolled drinking and then I drank compulsively and the end result was total corruption."
"There has got to be a better way to run my railroad."
"I am convinced that what gets us in here is that total aloneness."
"I violated every single principle that had been given to me."
"I hadn't had a new problem in a long time. If you stop and think about it there are no new problems, just variations of old themes."
"I was a feral drunk. You know, once upon a time I came from civilized people but now I am living in the wild."
"I was born with a criminal mindset...I was never taught to steal. It just came naturally."
"And my granny was behind the curtain with a rolling pin and a rosary, you know, the two staples of the Irish household."
"'A Design for Living' ...is that a conference for Interior Designers?"
"I realized that God never left me. He saved me many times....Life is the Gift and I've got the best gift of all and that gift is love."
"I had no self-esteem. I did not know who I was."
"You're looking at somebody that needed an answer from the time she was a small child. Ever since I can remember I have been absolutely strangled by the manifestations of self...I threw myself away...I got mixed up being strong with being mean."
"I believe my God wants no holes in my soul...that God will quench the secret desires of my heart even the ones unbeknownst to me."
"I give myself very bad advice sometimes."
"There was a time in Alcoholics Anonymous when I confused activity with action,"
"The papers said I was arrested. I say I was rescued."
"I can't live like this anymore. Please, help me."
"Keep coming back.", and he said, "OK, I'll see you in about 50 years."
"Pass It On"
"....two steps that I absolutely believe is where life began to change for me in Alcoholics Anonymous."
"My wolves come disguised as sheep."
"The difference between a spiritual awakening and a spiritual experience is that when we have a spiritual awakening, we awaken to the fact that we have had spiritual experiences our whole life."
"My job is to stop running and let the Hounds of Heaven catch me."
"My current service role at my home group is bleeding deacon."
"That did not solve the money problem."
"It started to stop working long before I started to stop drinking."
"I am either walking hand in hand with the Master or trying to catch up."
"I started sharing what it was like, what happened and what I wish I was like now."
"I had a ghastly secret that during my career of going to doctors I could not share - would not share. My secret was this - I had to drink. I had to drink to live. Now I knew this and I was very ashamed of it. But I was absolutely panic stricken at the thought that somebody would find out and when they found out they would try to remove me from the bottle and then, of course, I couldn't live, or at least that was what I believed."
"Service is nothing but the twelth Step in action. Service is not a separate part of AA. There are no separate parts of AA. It's all one AA Program."
"This business of coming out of your shell is so exciting ... You don't come from the outside in. There's no way. It's broken like a chicken, from the inside out."
"I am grateful that I came into a group of Alcoholics Anonymous that they studied the book, they believed everything that book said and they taught me this program of recovery. Thank God for people who stay in AA."
"Tenth grade were the funnest three years of my life."
"I was not a good husband. I was not a good father because I was not there when I was there."
"We live life forward but we understand it backward."
"I have had bouts of insanity in sobriety."
"This Program defies analysis."
"Lord, fill my mouth with worthwhile stuff and shut me up when I've said enough."
"I'm not going to take the past for a hitching post but for a guiding post."
"The Program is free but the admissions fee was so costly - took alot of money to get here but not only money."
"The Program teaches us how to stop from starting again."
"It is not a disgrace to have this disease of alcoholism but it is a disgrace to have it and not do anything about it."
"A hangover is something to occupy the head that wasn't used the night before."
"I didn't appreciate anything."
"I hope I'm adopted...I thought they were pathetic, and I treated them like they were pathetic."
"This tape tells perfectly what I had been given by AA and God by the time I was 11 years sober ....and what almost all got away by the time I was 18 1/2 years sober - Learn by my example!"
"I was dumped into the world, an Irish-Catholic and a victim, of course, and another alcoholic was launched out into the universe."
"No matter how bad I want that first drink, I want that second drink even more."
"We forget the Power of being human."
"Take a stroll in the sun."
"Maybe God puts people who are crippled in our way?"
"I really have it set because of this Program that nobody is taking my day away."
"You know that AA asks everyone not to be missionaries. It's a very big thing..."
"Stick with the winners? We are all winners!"
"Life is full of potholes but you got to learn to steer around them but Margie tried to plow right through them."
"I didn't stop believing in God, I just got afraid of His Will and shut the door on him."
"I know everything. I'm all knowed up. I've been knowed up for a long time."
"I came here ready to be miserable for the rest of my life, one day at a time, if I could just not drink."
"One of the things I hope my time in AA and my time working in this Program has done is to make me be the same person with everybody."
"I came into Alcoholics Anonymous because I couldn't stop drinking and I couldn't stand the way I was living anymore."
"I was never big on taking action. I was always making plans."
"I was tired of letting people make decisions for me, so I joined the Navy."
"But I had to step aside and cast aside everything that was good and clean and decent in my life because it interfered with my drinking.
I blasted through the lives of everyone I touched and you don't know what it means to me today to sit over there in that coffee room and touch your life gently and with love."
"If I would've known when I was out there that I was gonna have to report what it used to be like, I can guarantee you I would've taken notes."
"I really have no social skills. Everything I know I've learned from the men and women of Alcoholics Anonymous."
"Don't work the Steps - Take the Steps."
"Let the Steps do the work."
"Somewhere, early in our lives, we must form a philosophy of life. And on the success of that philosophy it must contain three things: Faith, Hope and Charity. Without those three things, we sink into an abyss of degradation and despair from which few return and many don't."
"If there's anything that makes an alcoholic mad, it's to ask him where he's been when he doesn't know himself."
"I didn't pick that sobriety date. It picked me."
"I have an opinion on everything and I am going to share it with you tonight and if that p*s you off well so be it."
"We have one Problem than includes all Problems - Conscious separation from. We have one answer which includes ALL answers - Conscious contact with each other and with God."
"For the first six years of my Program, I played God. You see, I held this big resentment that I couldn't drink anymore...I said fine. I'll go to one meeting a week and I won't drink and I'll stay home and I'll be a good wife and mother and I hated it. By the Grace of God, I did not drink."
"Honesty is the best tea."
"I always had a Higher Power. Whatever you could do for me - you had the Power...I came to AA in a blackout and woke up in a meeting in Columbus, OH"
"My sobriety date is the most important date to me because of all the great things that have happened."
"What we are dealing with here is a Terminal Disease."
"I didn't put the plug in the jug. My best thinking didn't bring me to AA...Because if I could do any of those things, right, it would make me non-alcoholic by definition. It would imply that have power, choice and control over the drink which I assure you is the last thing that I have."
"I was always a seeker...I had one question, 'What's wrong with me?' I never fit in. Still don't."
"The difference between being sober and recovery is ... everything."
"I am in protective custody - the protective custody of God and Alcoholics Anonymous."
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
"... it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."
"My sole mission was to get out of right here right now."
"I was down to my last 'woe is me'."
"I think there should be warning labels on alcohol and I know exactly what the warning label should say. It should say 'WARNING: This bottle may run out."
"Where could I hide", I said, "so I could never find myself?"
"I know. I could pretend that I'm not me or you nor he."
"I'll hide in a story and believe that it's real."
"Oh boy! What a joke on me."
"I started to sell myself. That's what we do."
"I thought I was moving up!"
"I showed out alot in Georgia just trying to get sober."
"God works when we don't and our God works when we can't."
"I'm really getting the gifts now!"
"Life is too important to be taken seriously."
"That is the incredible thing about us is the ability to overlook overwhelming evidence."
"We Irish have a fear of evaporation."
"We are all in a state of change and a state of Grace."
"We help lead each other to each other's God and each other's Spiritual Awakening."
"We are all just walking each other home."
"I am disgustingly anti-social when I drink. I pee on the couch and hit on your mom."
"My dad is not an alcoholic but my dad is a selfish, self-centered guy. My dad's focused on how he feels and how much fun he's having. I mean, gosh, who among us isn't? ...My dad saw a pretty girl when I was two - chased after her. He saw another pretty girl when my son was six - chased after her. My dad is just a guy that wants to enjoy his life and he makes mistakes along the way and people get hurt. He couldn't have done any different! That was his N-A-T-U-R-E! I was mad at him for NOT doing something he was not capable of doing."
"AA Works. God is real and He is in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous."
"Above all, before I can be any or even one of these things, I must always remember first that I am an alcoholic and that my life became unmanageable."
"I heard a speaker say one time, you only needed five words to be a sponsor. That was: yes, no really, WOW, whatever."
"Each newcomer is assigned a reasonably stable A. A. member whose ward he becomes during his brief period of introduction to our way of life. The "sponsor" helps make hospital arrangements, takes his man there, visits him frequently and sees that he is visited by other A. A.s whose experience might be specially helpful. Hence a prospect so handled has received a powerful shot of A. A. and a good preview of what our society is like before he ever goes to a meeting. At the hospital he has time to soberly think through his situation, read our literature and exchange impressions with other alcoholics who are going through the same process. Contrast this with the frequent situation in which, for lack of hospitalization, the sponsor has to try to "taper off" his prospect at home or drag him, half dazed, to an A. A. meeting where the new man proceeds to get a lot of confused impressions or unfounded prejudices. While many of us have made our first contact with A. A. under these unfavorable circumstances, and have stuck nevertheless, there are probably many who do not stick on such a poor contact; people who might have remained with us had they been properly hospitalized and sponsored."
"It's nice to be invited. There was a time in my life when people stopped inviting me. I used to go anyway,"
"This is the most important day of my life because this is the only day of my life."
"You don't have to BE good - you ARE good."
"I did not want to be Hispanic and Persian. I wanted to be something exotic. I didn't know what that was."
"I don't identify as a drug addict. I never met a drug alcohol couldn't help."
"If you don't like my driving, get off the sidewalk."
"I didn't like the way I felt, and I kept self-medicating...It's like I spent 30 years in a blackout."
"I did not want to give it up no matter what."
"She is hilariously funny. She has a temper like a two year old but she lives Alcoholics Anonymous and the people she has helped throughout her sobriety is phenomenal."
"But the same thing was happening over and over again."
"I have had five sponsors, six if you count me."
"If I had to live on one side of the AA triangle, it would be on the service side."
"Don't drink, even if your ass falls off."
"Then the gig was up...Those are the sorts of things that practicing alcoholics do."
"by now sanity has returned"
"I am the only expert on my experience with this Book."
"Honesty"
"I was betrayed when I did my first fifth step inventory."
"Someday historians will look back on Alcoholics Anonymous as the greatest spiritual movement of the 21st century."
"I'm just a white trash knucklehead."
"I will jump headfirst off this podium if I thought it would get me attention from a girl."
"Only a fool, when properly informed, would give up the pleasures of slow dying and yet living."
"Now I've gone through some things alone in Alcoholics Anonymous but only when I chose to."
"The Big Book does not go through dozens of ideas a few times.
It goes through a few ideas dozens of times."
"I was a guy who ran out of friends and enemies at the same time."
"This may be sacrilege in AA but I loved to drink. I loved everything about it....Life interfered with my drinking."
"God, I have no idea where I'm going. I do not see the road ahead of me and I cannot know for certain where it will end nor do I really know myself.
And the fact that I think I am following Your Will does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe this: I believe the desire to please You does in fact please You and I hope I have that desire in everything I do and I hope I never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know if I do this, You will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it at the time.
Though I seem to be lost, in the very shadow of death, I will not be afraid because I know You will never leave me to face my troubles all alone."
"I used to say I came from a dysfunctional family but I'm it. The rest of my family was fine."
"I truly believe that alcoholism is a feeling illness."
"These are my people."
"Joy is a direct result of gratitude."
"If you are in this room expecting to be rocketed into the fourth dimension, you're in the wrong place."
"I share this not for sympathy but for identification."
"I believe this is a genetic thing because I have just seen it too many times."
"I was filled with such a sense of peace and serenity ... If I could only hang in and walk through this darkness that there would be a light at the end of the tunnel."
"As I see AA World Service through the Prisons, Hospitals and Churches."
"Now, don't get upset when I talk about God to new people, cause I'm not trying to save any souls. I would not know what to do with them if I did. But I have to talk about God because He has done so much for me through this Program."
"But I'm stuck with my story and unfortunately so are you...My goal... is to communicate to somebody in this room the miracle that can take place in your life if you decide to follow a few simple suggestions."
"When I am faced with a fact and I am faced with a feeling, without Alcoholics Anonymous, I turn to the feeling."
"We didn't know whether to crawl into church or cartwheel."
"I don't think I came into AA to get sober...but to live in a world soberly."
"Alcohol did that thing for me that no other human could do."
"It was at that time that I began to see who Yvonne really was."
"My feet are trained in Alcoholics Anonymous. It doesn't matter what is happening in my head."
"But no! Six and Seven are the crux of everything."
"There are, I suggest, three fundamental requirements for growth in the spiritual life: The first is desire.The second is humility and the third is flexibility."
"Resentment is OK within limits."
"Every time Bill talks about Principles he's talking about the Steps..."
"He said 'Practice these principles in all our affairs'. How you gonna' do that? Make your own Program, folks. Got to make your own because your affairs are different than everybody else's."
"There are two things you are going to remember for the rest of your days: no matter what's going on in your life, you do not understand; then you'll have understanding. Then when you quit trying to understand you'll enjoy it.
And the other thing is that, no matter what your situation is, it is never them, it's never God, it's never the situation, it's you that must become different. You must become more different than you have ever been before."
"All that's going to have to happen here, you're going to have to become a person who is willing to give up all of his defects of character. That's all.
And to become willing to give up my defects of character, I am going to have to be willing thrrough situations to not act on any of my defects so that God can remove them from me which is going to take some process of time...
And the thing that kills me, is that I am not going to get any credit for it at all."
"I am never going to have anything my way. I am going to give up all control.
I am not going to try to control another humen being at all. I am not going to find fault with another human being.
There is no way to live with another human being and find fault with them. You just can't do it. It will not work."
"I was given the Twenty-Four Hour a Day book by my sponsor.
That's not what people call approved literature. I don't even know if AA has approved the Bible or not.
But I understand it's not a bad book. I've just recently noticed their stealing some of our stuff."
"You can be just as happy as you want to be."
"The Twelve Concepts for World Service were written by A.A.'s co-founder Bill W., and were adopted by the General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1962."
"I am writing to you to tell you now sorry I am for letting you down so very many times over the past years."
"My friend, I wish you weren't here."
"There is only one problem that includes all problems and that is conscious separation from."
"If I could get this over there and those two over there and that one dead - this would be pretty nice here."
"And so, about four or five years ago I just said to myself, ' I'm going to fully awaken.' I don't know if I am but ... I can't tell you what's happened after that...Things keep coming in that are really exciting."
"How do we reconcile being true to ourselves with getting rid of self?"
"Truth exists in the silence where thought doesn't exist."
"Stop believing in what you believe. Go beyond belief."
"To be free of thoughts is meditation. Watch yourself watching thoughts."
"When you are conscious of your breath, you are totally in the present."
"There is no meaning in life; it just is. You may make up a meaning, but it does not
come from life itself'
"The eye through which I look for God is the eye that God is looking out
of."
"To get an answer to a pressing question, form it then drop it into the stillness and wait. The answer will come, or your question will disappear!"
"God is the essence of all life. Stillness is the language that God speaks. Stillness and the Divine are one."
"Is the 4th dimension of existence in the silence? If not, where?"
"The starting place for all reflection or contemplation is the fact of your own existence. The question to be asked is, 'Who are you?'"
"A perfectly spiritual being falls asleep and dreams he is very imperfect believes and feels accordingly. How does he return to spiritual perfection? Answer: 'By awakening.'"
"The Bottom Line of life is that everything is most wonderfully inexplicable!"
"The mystery of life is the mystery of me."
"AA is an utter simplicity which encases a complete mystery."
"I am not the greatest hero of emotional sobriety in the world."
"A.A.'s Twelve Steps are a group of principles, spiritual in their nature, which, if practiced as a way of life, can expel the obsession to drink and enable the sufferer to become happily and usefully whole."
"I am the adult spouse of an Al-Anon. Somebody has to do that."
"Fear is a real big part of my story."