“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.”

“The greatest promise in the program is the one in the Twelfth Step. It tells me I will have a spiritual awakening as the result of the Steps. I know I need that awakening to have a chance to stay sober.”

“I sabotage myself if I attach my sobriety to people, places, or things.”

“Only the sharing of despair can bring us ... illumination.”

“No matter how truthful the words of my message, there could be no deep communication if what I said and did was colored by pride, arrogance, intolerance, resentment, imprudence, or desire for personal acclaim -- even though I was largely unconscious of these attitudes.”

“Some of us take a long time to ‘come to’ before we can ‘come to believe’ that there is any hope for us.”

“Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.”

“Certainly, we need leaders, but we must regard them as the human agent of the Higher Power and not with undue adulation as individuals.”

“Anonymity is a spiritual foundation not only of Tradition Twelve, but of sobriety itself.”

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

“God grant that AA may ever stay simple.”

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

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

“If each sufferer were to carry the news of the scientific hopelessness of alcoholism to each new prospect, he might be able to lay every newcomer wide open to a transforming spiritual experience.”