Jill Stark > Quotes

“I realise something. My ‘fuck it, I just want to get smashed’ moments are usually about boredom and pleasure-seeking. When I get drunk, it’s a choice. For so many others, it’s about obliteration — a way to block out the pain. Yet, despite the tragic circumstances that cause already vulnerable people to seek solace in a bottle or through a needle, as a community we still treat addiction as if it’s a character failing. How often do we turn our heads as we judge the unpleasant-smelling man staggering through the train carriage? It’s funny how we view public drunkenness as socially unpalatable if it’s an old man drinking Scotch from a brown paper bag, but it’s a bit of fun if it’s a group of young women causing a commotion on a hen’s night. It makes me wish, once again, that I’d shown more compassion to my granddad. I was young, but I still judged him.”
― Jill Stark, High Sobriety: My Year Without Booze

“Butch says that the art of ‘becoming a chameleon’ — blending into your contacts’ environment — is the key to establishing rapport and earning trust. If that means sitting in the park and eating a sandwich, he’ll do that. If the contact wants to grab a coffee or go for a walk, he’ll oblige them. But more secrets are spilled over a few beers.”
― Jill Stark, High Sobriety: My Year Without Booze

“evil. Health reporting can induce the sort of hypochondria that would make Woody Allen proud. But some health messages I chose to ignore; I had only stubbed my last cigarette out a couple of years before. It had taken several weeks of waking up in the middle of the night with coughing fits that made my abdominal muscles ache before I finally called it a day. Sometimes the only way you can change is when the future slaps you in the face so hard it leaves a handprint on your cheek.”
― Jill Stark, High Sobriety: my year without booze

“Drinking puts you in a psychological or behavioural mode, and if you don’t have synergy with that mode then you’re not part of the party. You’ve just got to learn to find other ways in life.”
― Jill Stark, Higher Sobriety: my years without booze

“For all the wine-tasting and brandy snifters and expensive cellars, it’s essentially no different from sniffing petrol or chroming. It’s just dressed up,’ he said. ‘Can you imagine businessmen with plastic bags spraying paint and saying, “Why, yes, it’s a 1954 Dulux. Yes, that was a good year. Is that the enamel? Ah, lovely.”
― Jill Stark, High Sobriety: My Year Without Booze

“Gripping the microphone, my eyes half closed under the lights, I think of my 413 days without alcohol. And I think of Jude’s short life. The two things that have forever changed my view of the world. They brought me here, to this stage. I’m no longer the scared procrastinator, cowering under the covers with my dreams still inside me. I hope I never will be again.”
― Jill Stark, High Sobriety: My Year Without Booze

“After all, alcohol can help us to make friends, cope with tough times, celebrate victories, and generally improve our otherwise sad and dull lives.”
― Jill Stark, Higher Sobriety: my years without booze

“What a monumental waste of time that now seems, to spend so much of life hung-over, sleeping away my weekends and cowering under the covers, scared of life. I used to tell myself that the places I was going to visit, the friends I cancelled on, or the family I was meaning to call could wait until tomorrow. How cavalier of me to presume those opportunities would always be there.”
― Jill Stark, High Sobriety: My Year Without Booze

“I walk away feeling that something’s not quite right. On the tram home, I realise why: this is completely alien to me because I’ve never done it before. But this is what grown-up dating is like. You go out, you chat, you get to know each other, and over several dates you gradually build up a connection based on mutual respect, trust, and attraction. Until now, I’ve been unwilling to wait; I’ve tried to hurry that spark into a six-foot-tall flame of passion by dousing it in alcohol. I thought if I could initiate physical contact — a kiss, a grope, or a shag — I’d know that the guy was interested. Now I can see that all it meant was he was pissed and horny. Even if I never hear from this guy again, tonight will have been worth it for that revelation alone.”
― Jill Stark, High Sobriety: My Year Without Booze

“Apart from Lucy and Shanan, the only person I know today is my other former flatmate, Oliver. At dinner, I’m seated next to him, and he helpfully announces to the whole table that I’m not drinking. I’m asked if I’m pregnant. I say no. Oliver tells them that I’m writing a book about my booze-free year. There are a few astonished faces. A guy sitting opposite me pipes up, ‘That would be a really short book. Fucking boring. The end.’ I laugh politely, but secretly I want to stab him in the eye with my entree fork. He says that stopping drinking would be easy in winter, but impossible during Melbourne’s Spring Racing Carnival: ‘You can’t not drink at the races. You just can’t.’ This, it seems, is an indisputable fact. He tells me how he stopped drinking for three months a few years ago, and every day of it was so boring that he’d never do it again. He doesn’t appear to see the irony in the fact that with a beer in his hand, he’s the most boring man alive.”
― Jill Stark, High Sobriety: My Year Without Booze

“When you take alcohol away, you have a choice: you either do the things you’re scared to do completely sober, or you don’t do them at all.”
― Jill Stark, High Sobriety: my year without booze