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“I can’t imagine anything that would make me so mad, glad, or sad that I would want to go back to what I was before AA.”

“My emotional bottom came in sobriety ... I actually had to sit and feel all those feelings I had worked so hard to drown out with alcohol.”

“I’m better able to love people when the storm of my judgmental mind settles, when I understand and empathize rather than criticize and condemn.”

“As AA grows, it is impossible to know everyone, but if I try to relate myself with just one other person, something will happen, something remarkable.”

“When we early AAs got our first glimmer of how spiritually prideful we could be, we coined this expression: ‘Don’t try to get too damned good by Thursday!’”

“One of the first insights Dr. Bob and I shared was that all true communication must be founded on mutual need. Never could we talk down to anyone, certainly not to a fellow alcoholic. We saw that each sponsor would have to humbly admit his own needs as clearly as those of his prospect.”

“Until I was at my complete bottom, alcohol wasn’t even my problem. But thankfully, when I did hit bottom, AA was not hard to find.”

“It was at my home group that I learned to trust the experiences of the early groups with meetings. We have a Traditions meeting once a month and when I was new and heard the Traditions read out loud, the experiences of the early AA meetings gave me the first notion that real people -- drunks like me -- started this program.”

“If I am in pain, it may be beneficial to me if I am aware of those in even more pain ... The answer for my pain is in the Twelfth Step.”

“The grace of the Fellowship and the principles of the program carry us through the tough spots as well as the times of joy. Whether we are sober 33 days or 33 years, we each receive our daily reprieve from active alcoholism by working this program to the best of our ability, one day at a time.”

“Spirituality is not based on logic, it is faith-driven. Faith makes the impossible possible.”

“I think my Higher Power stepped in and started leading me out of the alcoholic life, as I seemed incapable of doing it on my own.”

“We are privileged to communicate with each other to a degree and in a manner not very often surpassed among our nonalcoholic friends in the world around us.”

“Nobody argued about whose Higher Power was higher.”

“Many ask ‘What is anonymity?’ and ‘What is humility?’ To me, they are almost the same thing. They are devoid of prestige; they demand nothing; they don’t ask to be ‘right’; they simply suggest that the icy egocentric elements in all of us retire into the background and that we wear the warm cloak of anonymity and humility and therefore, spirituality.”