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“As devastatingly difficult as they have been, the last two years have been a giant Seventh Tradition workshop. Never in my married life or in any time before it had I truly understood what being self-supporting meant. I had relied on others to take care of me, not just financially, but emotionally and spiritually, too, and I let my life go to hell if they didn’t.”

“Today I think I can trace a clear linkage between my guilt and my pride. Both of them were certainly attention-getters. In pride I could say, ‘Look at me, I am wonderful.’ In guilt I would moan, ‘I’m awful.’ Therefore guilt is really the reverse of the coin of pride. Guilt aims at self-destruction, and pride aims at the destruction of others.”

“My sponsor told me that if I stayed away from the first drink a day at a time and followed the suggested Twelve Steps, I could lead a sober life. She didn’t promise me health, wealth, happiness, love -- or comfort. All she promised me was sobriety! Thank goodness, she didn’t promise me anything else, because along the AA path I have found sickness, death, unhappiness, and considerable discomfort. But I have also found the greatest joy, love, and happiness of my life.”

“The simple word ‘we’ stands at the entrance to the Steps, reminding me that my power is limited.”

“If you sponsor people, you’ll never need a mirror.”

“Let us AAs no longer be takers from society. Instead, let us be givers.”

“Many of us think today the main problem of Alcoholics Anonymous is this: How, as a movement, shall we maintain our humility -- and so our unity -- in the face of what the world calls a great triumph? Perhaps we need not look far afield for an answer. We need only adapt and apply to our group life those principles upon which each of us has founded his own recovery.”

“I’m becoming so secure in AA, I’ve even discarded the cute, funny, phony me my civilian friends used to know. I don’t have to dance with a rose in my teeth; I can just dance. And I don’t have to be the only girl at the picnic who can swing Tarzan-style from a rope into the river. I can swim calmly, like the forty-year-old mother of four I am.”

“I saw that fear was a character defect, so I modified my Seventh Step Prayer. After ‘remove every single defect of character,’ I added, ‘and every unreasonable fear.’”

“My spiritual awakening has involved three major leaps: Save Me, Help Me, and Use Me.”

“It should be the privilege, even the right, of each individual or group to handle anonymity as they wish ... Each individual will have to decide where he ought to draw the line -- how far he ought to carry the principle in his own affairs, how far he may go in dropping his own anonymity without injury to Alcoholics Anonymous as a whole.”

“It seems to me that one of the major purposes of the last three Steps is to keep us from complacency, to keep us growing so that we don’t fall back into our old, sick ways and perhaps even into active alcoholism.”