“We have all known and seen miracles – the healing of broken individuals, the rebuilding of broken homes. And always, it has been constructive, personal Twelfth Step work based on an ever-upward-looking faith which has done the job.”

“The only thing that could chase my disease was the sun rising on a new morning. Just like when I was counting days, and I would wake up and think, Hey, I made it.”

“The essence of all growth is a willingness to change for the better and then an unremitting willingness to shoulder whatever responsibility this entails.”

“I’ve learned that I am not responsible for anyone’s happiness except my own. Most importantly, I learned that true happiness is an inside job.”

“The leap of faith must be taken again and again over greater and greater distances.”

Had I not been blessed with wise and loving advisers, I might have cracked up long ago.”

“AA may or may not get me to heaven, but it surely got me out of hell.”

“I’m usually about eighty percent of the problem – well, maybe sixty percent, but the major part, you can bet on that. If I can leave out the largest percent (me), there is hardly any problem at all!”

“The experience of reality does not have to be postponed.”

“Because each of us, at any moment, is the sum total of every choice he or she has ever made, it is not sheer fantasy to expect each day to be the very best day we have yet lived.”

“If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy demand. Let us, with God’s help, continually surrender these hobbling liabilities.”

“Sponsorship is a bridge to trusting the human race, the very race we once resigned from. In learning to trust, we are strengthening our sobriety.”

“My sponsor ... gave me some good advice. ‘Take the words success and failure out of your vocabulary. Replace them with honesty and effort.’”

“I make a conscious effort to keep it simple, because the simpler I make it, the happier I become.”

“As an individual I am so small I’m almost totally meaningless in the universe; it’s almost as if I didn’t exist. But not quite ... As small as I am, I’m not totally meaningless.”