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“For my sake, as well as the well-being of the women I sponsor, I stay within what I know. I tell them I’m not a mother, sister, favorite aunt, therapist, counselor, guru, spiritual advisor, AA authority, and sometimes not even a friend. I’m just another drunk who didn’t drink and didn’t die...”

“Though my sobriety had come easy, the growing up business hadn’t. Both emotional and spiritual growth have always been mighty difficult for me.”

“Times change, people change, and language may change. But the disease of alcoholism does not change. It always kills.”

“I’ve found that I’m not a cordless model: I need to plug into God in the morning and check in several times a day just to make sure I’m still plugged in.”

“I make a conscious effort to keep it simple, because the simpler I make it, the happier I become.”

“Belonging to a group makes life an opportunity for me ... something to encourage the best in me while it helps to keep me humble about the worst in me.”

“Our fellowship has been permitted to achieve -- though still in miniature -- the ‘one world’ dream of philosophers. Ours is a world in which we can hotly differ, yet never think of schism or conflict as a solution.”

“At my very first AA meeting ... I heard words of love, understanding and compassion ... I believe the hand of God reached down at that meeting and healed me. For from that day thirty-eight years ago to this, I have not had a desire to drink or escape from reality again.”

“We reject fantasizing and accept reality. And we find it beautiful. For, at last, we are at peace with ourselves. And with others. And with God.”

“When I can identify my own shortcomings in another, the battleground between us is removed.”

“Why dwell on what you can’t do? ... Why not concentrate on what you can do and do it?”

“A religious, or spiritual experience, is the act of giving up reliance on one’s own omnipotence.”

“I was told when I got sober that I could act my way into right thinking, but I could never think my way into right action.”

“I need to remember how humiliated, confused, insecure and frightened I felt at my first meeting, and compare that to how I feel today.”

“Ever so slowly, I could feel myself changing. Things that had seemed important were no longer important. There was inside me a warming, a softening, a stirring, as the petals of a rosebud stir almost imperceptibly into a blossom.”