Sherman Alexie Quotes

Everybody needs a way out of that pain. Many people choose drugs and alcohol. Some people obsessively exercise or develop strange dietary habits, which is what I did. At least it got me toward a path of healthier living.

Stop trying to find something in food that will make you feel better. I used to have eating disorders; I'd binge and purge all the time: fried oysters, po' boys, muffulettas, beignets, coffee and doughnuts. I tried to medicate myself with food when people made fun of me or hit me with a bat in school. I'd always turn to food.

I've dealt with a lot of physical pain, with a lot of emotional pain; anybody's who's ever been an alcoholic has handled both of those in extreme.

The stuffing/puking/stuffing/puking/stuffing/puking didn't make her skinny, it made her cry.

Many times drugs and alcohol - there's a technical term that they're called, emotional suppressants - are the only things that can help a person survive and get through and be able to deal with their pain.

I used to get drunk every night until I puked. Finally I admitted, "I am a bulemic".

All the Hennessy and weed can't hide, the pain i feel inside, its like I'm living just to die.

Anorexia, you starve yourself. Bulimia, you binge and purge. You eat huge amounts of food until you're sick and then you throw up. And anorexia, you just deny yourself. It's about control.

You can't drown yourself in drink. I've tried, you float.

As a teen, I was both anorexic and bulimic.

If I hadn't become a celebrity, I'd probably be an alcoholic.

My mother was a professional sick person; she took a lot of pain pills. There are many people like that. It's just how they are used to getting attention. I always remember she's the daughter of alcoholics who'd leave her alone at Christmas time.

Like many alcoholics, I was a staggering woman in a chic apartment, sick and utterly disgusting.

I'm a former bulimic myself and it's a horrible, horrible addiction.

There have been times in my life that I've had a ton of vices, and my demons have run amok for years and years and years.

Alcoholics are amazed when I admit to them my addiction to work. Here I have a ground of real and not imagined empathy with them. Against the background of this, I have dubbed this addiction of myself and my fellow ministers as “workaholism.”

My dad was a serious alcoholic, and ultimately, that's why he died. When you're a child of someone who struggled with things like that, you look for the common thread. Is there a pattern? Is there an inheritance of pathology in some way? That haunts me.

There's a brain chemistry - the floatiness and the disassociation and all the things that came with starving - I became addicted to.

I was poisoning myself with alcohol and medicating myself. I was trying to numb things. I was trying not to feel things, and that's ridiculous. It's one of the dumbest things you can do, because all you're doing is postponing the inevitable. Someday you'll have to look all those things in the eye rather than try to numb the pain.

When you're starving or wrapped up in a cycle of binge-ing-and-purging, or sexually obsessed with (someone), it is very hard to think about anything else, very hard to see the larger picture of options that is your life, very hard to consider what else you might need or want or fear were you not so intently focused on one crushing passion. I sat in my room every night, with rare exceptions, for three and a half years.

I drank for about 25 years getting over the loss of my father, and I took the anger out on myself. I did a good job at beating myself up sometimes.

If I hadn't been a drunkard, I probably would have committed suicide long ago.

I can't stand when people use drugs as an escape. It's like, everybody suffers. Deal with your issues, you'll feel so much better.

I drink because I wish to multiply my sufferings.

Drinking, eating, shopping, revenge, rebound sex, drugs or whatever your poison may be will number the pain - but that's all.