Top 60 Sarah Hepola Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sobriety sucked the biggest donkey dong in the world.”

— Sarah Hepola

2. “Some people are so brimful with misery they can’t help splashing everyone else.”

— Sarah Hepola

3. “We all live in the long shadow of the person we could have been.”

— Sarah Hepola

4. “Addiction was the inverse of honest work. It was everything, right now. I drank away nervousness, and I drank away boredom, and I needed to build a new tolerance. Yes to discomfort, yes to frustration, yes to failure, because it meant I was getting stronger. I refused to be the person who only played games she could win.”

— Sarah Hepola

5. “We all want to believe that our pain is singular – that no on else has felt this way – but our pain is ordinary, which is both a blessing and a curse. It means we’re not unique. But it also means we’re not alone.”

— Sarah Hepola

6. “Own your own feelings, skepticism, irrational rage. Stop pretending to be someone you aren’t, because otherwise you have to go into hiding whenever you can’t keep up the act.”

— Sarah Hepola

7. “I needed to be reminded that a human life is infinitesimal, even as its beauty is tremendous.”

— Sarah Hepola

8. “At bedtime, my mother would lean down close and tell me, “They said I could pick any girl baby I wanted, and I chose you.”

— Sarah Hepola

9. “Roofies aren’t a myth, he said, but studies suggest the fear outpaces the incidence. Turns out, “being roofied” often doesn’t involve roofies at all. People just don’t realize how common it is to experience a blackout.”

— Sarah Hepola

10. “Alcoholism is a self-diagnosis. Science offers no biopsy, no home kit to purchase at CVS. Doctors and friends can offer opinions, and you can take a hundred online quizzes. But alcoholism is something you must know in your gut.”

— Sarah Hepola

11. “Let’s get a drink,” we say to each other, when what we mean is “Let’s spend time together.” It’s almost as if, in absence of alcohol, we have no idea what to do. “Let’s take a walk in the park” would be met with some very confused glances.”

— Sarah Hepola

12. “The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them.”

— Sarah Hepola

13. “I kept longing for a secret conversation, away from the pitchforks of the Internet.”

— Sarah Hepola

14. “The misery of calorie restriction is well documented, but what people rarely mention is that it’s also a bit fun. How much hunger can I tolerate? How much joy can I withhold? What a perverse pleasure, to be in charge of your own pain.”

— Sarah Hepola

15. “I swear I’ve spent half my life hiding behind a couch and the other half wondering why no one was paying attention to me. On.”

— Sarah Hepola

16. “I wanted the gift of forgetting. Boozy love songs and brokenhearted ballads know the torture of remembering. If drinking don’t kill me, her memory will, George Jones sang, and I got it. The blackouts were horrible. It was hideous to let those nights slide into a crack in the ground. But even scarier was to take responsibility for the mess I’d made. Even scarier was to remember your own life.”

— Sarah Hepola

17. “I had this great idea: I should get a job. Freelancing came with freedom, but maybe what I required was a cage.”

— Sarah Hepola

18. “I’ve always been mixed up about attention, enjoying its warmth but not its scrutiny. I swear I’ve spent half my life hiding behind a couch and the other half wondering why no one was paying attention to me.”

— Sarah Hepola

19. “The troubled drinker’s sleight of hand – dividing your confessions among close friends but never leaving any one person doused with too much truth.”

— Sarah Hepola

20. “Sobriety has a way of sorting out your friendships. They begin to fall into two categories: people you feel comfortable being yourself with – and everyone else.”

— Sarah Hepola

21. “An evolved life requires balance. Sometimes you have to cut out one thing to find balance everywhere else.”

— Sarah Hepola

22. “Moving a pile of bricks from one side of the room to the other requires strength. Time, discipline, patience.”

— Sarah Hepola

23. “I recast myself in my own daydreams. I wondered what it would be like to change this. If I could ever collapse the space between myself and the human being sitting on the bench. Was it even possible? Because you can be a lot of things in this world, but you can never be another person. That’s the deal. You’re stuck with yourself.”

— Sarah Hepola

24. “The blackouts were horrible. It was hideous to let those nights slide into a crack in the ground. But even scarier was to take responsibility for the mess I’d made. Even scarier was to remember your own life.”

— Sarah Hepola

25. “I was puzzled by the demented winner-takes-all spirit of traditional religion: I go to heaven, and you do not. College taught me religion was the opium of the masses. God was for weak people who couldn’t handle their own lives.”

— Sarah Hepola

26. “I kept flashing back to an argument I used to have with my ex. Every time I vented about work, he rushed to hand-craft a solution, which was an irritating habit. All you want to do is fix me, I spat at him once. But I never thought to ask – Why do I have such a high tolerance for being broken?”

— Sarah Hepola

27. “I couldn’t tell you much about John 3:16, but I knew Blueberry Muffin: 426.”

— Sarah Hepola

28. “Overthinkers are the most exhausting alcoholics.”

— Sarah Hepola

29. “Now I realized what a sadistic game drinking played. It built up your confidence at the very moment you were looking your worst. After.”

— Sarah Hepola

30. “I stayed sober for a year and a half, which is like dog years to a 25-year-old. I.”

— Sarah Hepola

31. “Sometimes people drift in and out of your life, and the real agony is fighting it. You can gulp down an awful lot of seawater, trying to change the tides.”

— Sarah Hepola

32. “What nobody ever tells you is that miracles can be very, very uncomfortable.”

— Sarah Hepola

33. “Self-destruction is a taste I’ve savored much of my life.”

— Sarah Hepola

34. “It wasn’t fair that my friends could stay at Captain Morgan’s pirate ship party while I was drop-kicked into a basement with homeless people chanting the Serenity Prayer.”

— Sarah Hepola

35. “God was for weak people who couldn’t handle their own lives, and it took me a long time to understand that, actually, I was a weak person who couldn’t handle my own life, and I could probably use all the help I could get.”

— Sarah Hepola

36. “I watched women file in, hoping each new one in a smart dress suit was a fairy godmother carrying my new fate. I’d catch her glance as she passed, hoping she’d see the star pattern in my eyes. Oh, it’s you. I found you. Does every child have this fantasy – or just the sad ones?”

— Sarah Hepola

37. “I was a fire starter once. I could talk to anyone when I was drinking. I played therapist, devil’s advocate, clown.”

— Sarah Hepola

38. “But there is ecstasy in the room you are not supposed to enter, the room no one knows about. Ecstasy when everyone is gone and still you are held.”

— Sarah Hepola

39. “My self loathing was like a bone I couldn’t stop gnawing.”

— Sarah Hepola

40. “And then, there is nothing. Not a goddamn thing. This happens to me sometimes. A curtain falling in the middle of the act, leaving minutes and sometimes hours in the dark. But anyone watching me wouldn’t notice.”

— Sarah Hepola

41. “I noticed when I stopped worrying so much about how I looked, I could lose myself more in how I felt.”

— Sarah Hepola

42. “My mother used to tell me I was my own worst critic. Clearly, she wasn’t reading the comments.”

— Sarah Hepola

43. “Be kind to drunk people, for every one of them is fighting an enormous battle.”

— Sarah Hepola

44. “When I sit in rooms with people once considered washed up, I feel at home. I’ve come to think of being an alcoholic as one of the best things that ever happened to me. Those low years startled me awake. I stopped despairing for what I didn’t get and I began cherishing what I did.”

— Sarah Hepola

45. “I wanted more, but I also thought maybe I was being unrealistic. What’s the difference between a person who’s unfulfilled and a person who’s impossible to please?”

— Sarah Hepola

46. “But fearing another person’s opinion never stops them from having one.”

— Sarah Hepola

47. “The next week was humiliation buffet. There are times when you want to die. And then there are times when one death is simply not enough. You need to borrow other people’s live and end them, too.”

— Sarah Hepola

48. “For years, I kept an Onion story tacked above my desk: “Women Now Empowered by Everything a Woman Does.”

— Sarah Hepola

49. “But the one that stands out to me is how I quashed my feelings for the sake of someone else’s. His pleasure was important, not mine. His regret was important, not mine. It was a pattern I repeated for years.”

— Sarah Hepola

50. “I’m a little bit in love with you.” I might have. I made such pronouncements all the time when I was lit, because most women walked around with their self-esteem around their ankles, and I felt a duty to help them lift it up. You are really pretty. Did I ever tell you about the time you ordered the wine in perfect French? Alcohol turned all my jealousy into buttercream.”

— Sarah Hepola