“Notes in the same key resonate together .... No matter how much continuous sobriety I have to my and AA’s credit, I am still only one drink away from a drunk, just like everybody else in these meeting rooms.”
“Sobriety -- freedom from alcohol -- through the teaching and practice of the Twelve Steps, is the sole purpose of an AA group.”
"I don't just hear the slogans anymore; I feel them when I speak them ... They take hold of me; they change the course of my day if I let them."
“We don't have to go to Akron, Ohio, to see Dr. Bob's memorial. Dr. Bob's real monument is visible throughout the length and breadth of AA. Let us look again at its true inscription -- one word only, which we AAs have written. That word is sacrifice.”
“A new chapter has once again started in my life -- a chapter that has no ending, a chapter that I did not write, but a chapter with many characters.”
“Without a connection to my Higher Power, I am the same old person with the same old defects, causing the same old pain in my life and others’.”
“Serenely remarking to his attendant, ‘I think this is it,’ Dr. Bob passed out of our sight and hearing November sixteenth at noonday. So ended the consuming malady wherein he had so well shown us how high faith can rise over grievous distress. As he had lived, so he had died, supremely aware that in his Father's House are many Mansions.”
“Self-justification is a universal destroyer of harmony and of love. It sets man against man, nation against nation. By it, every form of folly and violence can be made to look right, and even respectable. Of course it is not for us to condemn. We need only investigate ourselves.”
“Think, think, think before you make that angry comment or mail that bitter letter. How important is it?”
“It is not stupid to accept myself and others complete with our imperfections. It would be stupid not to.”
“I don't know the music, but there is sound -- sometimes rushing and furious, sometimes gentle and caressing. But always there's the sound of a master pianist at play, conducting some mad orchestra of life. I don't know what or why or how, but I know I'm here. And the best I can do is to find God's will for me.”
“We work; we struggle; we will survive.”
“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.’”
“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?”
“Good public relations are AA lifelines reaching out to the alcoholic who still does not know us.”
