Quotes
"It's not that I'm not social. I'm social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you're purveying. It improves nothing. It's not nourishing. It's like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You're not hungry, you don't need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you're pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it's equally addictive."
p. 134
There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants.... The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken.
The fortunate man is the one who cannot take more than a couple of drinks without becoming intoxicated. The unfortunate wight is the one who can take many glasses without betraying a sign; who must take numerous glasses in order to get the kick.
And it's certainly bad, but when a man spends his relief checks on green whiskey his children have a way of crying from hunger pains. I don't know of any landowner around here who begrudges those children any game their father can hit. Of course he shouldn't, but he'll never change his ways. Are you going to take out your disapproval on his children?
“But hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them. Once you've had a little, you start shaking if you don't get more.”
A good addiction takes the guesswork out of death.
The magic of sexual addiction is you don't ever feel hungry or tired or bored or lonely.
In America, if your addiction isn't always new and improved, you're a failure.
When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.
She was an alcoholic. I didn't blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.
"A woman eats to feed her pussy." Meaning: Anything we do to excess is in compensation for not getting a minimum amount of sexual gratification....Men overimbibe alcohol because their penises are thirsty.
What you have to love about drinking is, every swallow is an irrevocable decision. You charging ahead, in control of the game. It's the same with pills, sedatives and painkillers, every swallow is a first definite step down some road.
