Quotes about addiction

No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline

The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.

You see control can never be a means to any practical end. ... Control can never be a means to anything but more control ... like Junk.

Every time I felt bored I rolled another cigarette out of my can of Prince Albert; there's nothing better in the world than a roll-your-own deeply enjoyed without hurry.

Over Christmas we looked through boxes of family pictures and played a game we call 'Find Mom, find Mom's cigarettes.' There's one in every picture. We've got photos of her pregnant, leaning toward a lit match, and others of her posing with her newborn babies, the smoke forming a halo above our heads. These pictures gave us a warm feeling.

She smoked in the bathtub, where we'd find her drowned butts lined up in a neat row beside the shampoo bottle. She smoked through meals, and often used her half-empty plate as an ashtray. Mom's theory was that if you cooked the meal and did the dishes, you were allowed to use your plate however you liked.

To really enjoy drugs you've got to want to get out of where you are. But there are some wheres that are harder to get out of than others. This is the drug-taking problem for adults. Teenage weltschmerz is easy to escape. But what drug will get a grown-up out of, for instance, debt?

Every generation finds the drug it needs.

Gamblers need action, even when the odds suck. And so they return to the ships, night after night—the slot-machine ladies, clutching their plastic cups of quarters; the shouting, hard-drinking craps-table crowd; the roulette addicts, who truly believe, all evidence to the contrary, that there is something lucky about their birthdates; the blackjack loners, with their foolproof systems that don't work—all of them eager to resume the inexorable process of transferring their cash to whoever owns the ship. In the case of the Extravaganza of the Seas, the owner of record was a man named Bobby Kemp, who was usually described in the newspaper as a millionaire entrepreneur. Kemp liked the look of that, entrepreneur, although he personally could not pronounce it. (Chapter 2)