Margaret Halsey Quotes

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

You may have decided again and again, and again and again you have failed - not because smoking is such a great phenomenon that you cannot get out of it, but because you are trying from the wrong end. Rather than becoming aware of the whole situation - why you smoke in the first place - rather than becoming aware of the process of smoking, you are simply trying to drop it. It is like pruning the leaves of a tree without cutting the roots.

What's the Use of Getting Sober (When You Gonna Get Drunk Again)

I never went out in the morning with the intention of getting drunk. It just happened.

For every habit we have, for every experience we go through over and over, for every pattern we repeat, there is a NEED WITHIN US for it.

The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals.

We drink and we die and continue to drink.

Habit is, to weak minds, a species of moral predestination, from which they have no power to escape.

Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively.

See what a person is doing every day, day after day, and you'll know who that person is and what he or she is becoming.

The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

You start doing the addictive behavior to feel good and then your receptors get overloaded with dopamine, then you stop doing the addictive thing and some of the receptors have shut down and you don't have enough dopamine to feel good. So then you feel bad and go back to the addictive behavior to get more dopamine. The strange thing is that it works with what we think of as uppers and downers and whatever you call gambling - sidewaysers.

If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work.

Addictive behavior is kind of the inverse of procrastination: procrastination is about not being able to do what you want to do, addiction about not being able to not do what you don't want to do (drink, use drugs, etc.)

The drinking was getting way out of control. I just didn't recognize myself anymore. I didn't know what I was doing or where I was. I always had to have some drinks with me in my bag. Just waking up shaking and then having Bloody Marys on your own, first thing in the morning-I started to feel really pathetic about it. So I was like, "I can't live like this." It was just this really awful feeling of becoming a totally different person and not being able to control it at all. Then I tried to not drink, but that didn't work. So I figured I should just go to rehab.

How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now.

Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they've been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual.

The easier it is to do something, the harder it is to change the way you do it.

Alcohol causes a lot of problems, and then to solve these problems, you drink more.

It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.

They say the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. The chains you put around yourself now have enormous consequences as you go through life.

Character is, for the most part, simply habit become fixed.

I don't have a drinking problem 'Cept when I can't get a drink.

Drugs and alcohol were ruling my life. I made a lot of bad decisions while I was drinking alcohol. The first thing I stopped was cigarettes and tobacco.

Alcohol is an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind.