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“Coincidences are merely a manner in which God protects his anonymity.”

“When I first started in AA, I began each day asking God to help keep me sober that day, and ended each night by thanking him for another day of sobriety. I still end each day that way, as I have done almost every night during the past forty-one years. It is a routine for me, but every once in a while I pause to reflect on what it truly means. I do it every night so that God won’t change his mind, as I truly believe he helped lead me from the pits of alcoholism to the AA way of life.”

“I have always carried a meeting list and quarter for a phone call because I don’t know when I am going to want another drink.”

“Our Serenity Prayer ... brings a new light to us that can dissipate our old-time and nearly fatal habit of fooling ourselves.”

“We now know that we do not have to run away, nor ought we again try to overcome adversity by still another bulldozing power drive that can only push up obstacles before us faster than they can be taken down.”

“Full consciousness ... implies not only the willingness to receive the love and benefits AA has to offer, but also to surrender to the equally painful experience of exposure to ourselves, and others, of ourselves.”

“We can’t grow without giving ourselves space for silence and the voice within.”

“We measure our progress in AA by two words, ‘humility’ and ‘responsibility.’ May I ever keep my eye on these yardsticks as I continue to seek only knowledge of his will for me.”

“Today’s disappointment, viewed six months hence, may turn out to be one of the best breaks we ever got.”

“Success and failure share a common denominator ... both are temporary.”

“God grant that AA may ever stay simple.”

“I have no secrets, and I fear no man. I am not anxious about death. I am alive, forever, within this 24 hours.”

“I no longer feel isolated, alone or without purpose. I feel like life is going somewhere, and I don’t feel like I have to know where.”

“Today, there are hundreds of [AA] centers shedding their warm illumination upon the lives of thousands, lighting the dark shoals where the stranded and hopeless lie breaking up -- those fingers of light already stretching to our beachheads in other lands.

Now comes another lighted lamp -- this little newspaper called the Grapevine. May its rays of hope and experience ever fall upon the current of our AA life and one day illumine every dark corner of this alcoholic world.”

“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.”