Frank Brown

I drank to avoid: that I have to make myself essential so people won't kick me out or abandon me, that my only value is in how useful or accommodating I can be to other people.

“The love of [God] who loved us greatly is greatly to be loved,”

I don’t how shame came to be part of the equation of who I am—but it ran pretty deep. I think that sense of inner shame is pretty common among us alcoholics and addicts; it’s true that drinking and using let us escape other people and external obligations—but it was mostly me that I was running from.

I finished a notebook (Field Notes United States of Letterpress edition) and typed up anything worth remembering.

all the things I had assumed would make me happy in sobriety never panned out the way I thought they would. Many of the dreams I'd had before I got sober simply do not matter anymore. There are no more dreams big enough to replace this wild new reality. My life is much smaller than it used to be, but it's also the biggest it's ever been.

what I value most in a relationship are, in ever-shifting order, humor, empathy, intelligence, understanding and surprise.

"Your point of view is something personal to you. It is no one's truth but yours. Then, if you get mad at me, I know you are dealing with yourself. I am the excuse for you to get mad. And you get mad because you are afraid, because you are dealing with fear."

the Sermon on the Mount and especially the Beatitudes are a set of descriptions of a free life.

I tell them that the Big Book isn’t about getting religion or worshipping anything—it’s simply about recognizing where you really stand in the Universe and answering some very personal questions about how you got here, where you’d like to go and the things that would need to change, to make that possible.