Alcoholism

"Jesus," he said to himself. "Drunk for ten years."

"...and another little drink wouldnt do us any harm."

"‘Tis not the eating, nor ‘tis not the drinking that is to be blamed, but the excess."

"Habitual intoxication is the epitome of every crime."

"Alcoholism is the disease of more."

"Think about the great thinkers of our time and those times before and in antiquity. Think about Aristotle, Plato and Socrates and Maimonides and Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Rodin and George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Edison and Oprah Winfrey and those liberation thinkers like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and Marcus Garvey and Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela. Think about it my brothers and sisters, Cesar Chavez and George Washington Carver and Booker T Washington, Adam Clayton Powell ectera. Think about them! They were [thinkers]. Pitful our generation and our people today. Here it is 2008, and were worse off now than weve ever been because our young people do not have the ability to — Think about it! How pitiful we are, here they are on drugs, on heroin, on cocaine, alcoholics. Here they are at the disposal of these kingpins and ectera, because they cant. Here they are making gangs families because they cant."

"Morpheus gifts used to come to me in bottles, Beam and black Jack Daniels, straight up with a frosted schooner of Jax on the side, while the rain poor down in the neon glow outside the window of an all-night bar not far from the Huey Long Bridge. In a half hour I could kick open a furnace door and fling into the flames all the snakes and squeaking bats that lived inside me. Except the next morning they would writhe with new life in the ashes and come back home, stinking and hungry."

"In a few hours it would be midnight and I would have gone a full day on my own without a drink. And one day could mean two. If I stayed off the booze, I knew Id be able to write again. I started the Dart and headed north up the Coast Highway. There was a blueness to the ocean I had never noticed before."

"Mrs. Morse had been drinking all the afternoon; while she dressed to go out, she felt herself rising pleasurably from drowsiness to high spirits. But as she came out into the street the effects of the whisky deserted her completely, and she was filled with a slow, grinding wretchedness so horrible that she stood swaying on the pavement, unable for a moment to move forward."

"In my lowest moments, the only reason I didnt commit suicide was that I knew I wouldnt be able to drink any more if I was dead."

"Its not like anything you can beat—no matter how hard you try. … Its just that you cant really help them and its so discouraging—its all for nothing."

"Jack London, |location=New York|publisher=The Century Company|year=1913|pages=286–287}} illustrated by ; text at archive.org"