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“I have had to face my past, one episode at a time, and become willing to look at the truth. I could feel the pain and fear, like trolls under the bridge, waiting to jump out and challenge my self-esteem.”

“I no longer always have to be right.”

“It’s true that the only requirement for membership in AA is a desire to stop drinking. But if you absolutely want a better life, well, hmmm ... How’s this? Working the Steps with a sponsor is a really good idea.”

“Putting principles before personalities, both inside and outside the Fellowship, does not always endear me to everyone, but I would rather be disliked for what I am than liked for what I am not.”

“Compromise comes hard to us ‘all-or-nothing drunks.’ Nevertheless, we must never lose sight of the fact that progress is nearly always characterized by a series of improving compromises.”

“What is involved in taking the entire AA program, as the early AAs gave it to us, is not the prospect of turning into some sort of repulsive goody-goody. It’s the threat of being truly alive, aware, and perhaps even ecstatic.”

“Perhaps those who know just a little about AA think our meetings must become dull and monotonous and our talks collapse into tiresome and repetitious laments or tortured remembrances .... Not so! As AAs, we need these lifesaving contacts to support and maintain our happily found sobriety .... For us, our meetings are eternally new, each offering something -- whether happy or tragic -- to encourage, sustain, and reaffirm our precious sobriety.”

“We who have been helped by AA are as letters of God addressed to our friends and fellow men. By our attitudes, our speech and our behavior are we to show them the transforming power of AA's philosophy of life.”

“AA is no set of tablets handed down to some latter-day Moses -- but a continuing creative process in which we all take part, a perpetual journey from the known to the unknown, a truth ever-arriving through experience.”

“AA’s Twelve Traditions are little else than a list of sacrifices which the experience of twenty years has taught us that we must make, individually and collectively.”

“If we expend even five percent of the time on Step Eleven that we habitually (and rightly) lavish on Step Twelve, the results can be wonderfully far-reaching.”

“‘Historians may one day point to Alcoholics Anonymous as a society which did far more than achieve a considerable measure of success with alcoholism and its stigma; they may recognize Alcoholics Anonymous to have been a great venture in social pioneering which forged a new instrument for social action, a new therapy based on the kinship of common suffering, one having vast potential for the myriad other ills of mankind.’”

“After several years of regular attendance at an Eleventh Step study, a simple meditation came to me that I think of as the ‘alcoholic's meditation.’ With each in-breath, I think, Welcome. With each out-breath, I think, Thank you. That leaves me fluctuating between acceptance and gratitude, which I recognize as two of the integral principles of Alcoholics Anonymous.’”

“Good public relations are AA lifelines reaching out to the alcoholic who still does not know us.”

“In this moment, regardless of what happened before or what may happen tomorrow, what is the very best thing I can possibly do, right now?”