The 164 and More book is sold on this website at the Publisher List Price of $20.00 plus postage.
The book may also be sold by Intergroup/Central Offices or recovery book stores at List Price
or slightly higher. But beware of others that sell the book marked up 400% or more.
For the same money, you could buy 4 books and use 3 as sponsee gifts.
From the books ... Alcoholics Anonymous (Big Book) and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (12 & 12)
Click the page number or the book cover icon
to view that page in the literature.1.
2.
3.
I have a shadowy recollection of being in
an airplane bound for New York, and of finding a friendly taxicab driver at the landing field instead of my wife.
4.
Notice that the word "fear" is bracketed alongside the difficulties with Mr. Brown, Mrs. Jones, the employer, and the
wife.
5.
6.
If there is any indication
that he wants to stop, have a
good talk with the person most interested in
him -- usually his wife.
7.
8.
Wishing to be polite, though I felt very badly, I said, "Let's make the call," and extracted from my wife a promise that we would not stay
over fifteen minutes.
9.
10.
11.
The house was taken over by the mortgage holder, my mother-in-law died, my wife and father-in-law became ill.
12.
My wife and I abandoned ourselves with enthusiasm to the idea of helping other alcoholics to a solution
of their problems.
13.
I failed to persuade my broker friends to send me out looking over factories and managements, but my wife and
I decided to go anyway.
14.
15.
16.
This worked nicely until my wife and I went to see Wallace Beery in "Tugboat Annie," after which the pant-leg and stocking racket were out!
17.
After consulting with his
wife and partner he came to the conclusion that
it was better to take those risks than to stand before his Creator guilty of such ruinous slander.
18.
19.
My wife became deeply interested, and it
was her interest that sustained mine, though I at no time sensed that it might be an
answer to my liquor problem.
20.
21.
We found it very desirable to take this spiritual step with an understanding person, such as our wife, best friend, or spiritual adviser.
22.
His wife came, scarcely daring to be hopeful, though she thought she saw something different about
her husband already.
23.
24.
We could not be invited out because I would surely get tight, and my wife dared not invite people in for the same reason.
25.
26.
27.
28.
Before then, I had written
lots of sweet promises, but my wife happily observed that this
time I meant business.
29.
The alcoholic, realizing what his wife has endured, and now fully understanding how
much he himself did to damage her and his children,
nearly always takes up his marriage responsibilities with a willingness to repair what
he can and to accept what he can't.
30.
Many a distracted wife has visited this house to find loving and understanding
companionship among women who knew her problem, to hear from the lips of their husbands what had
happened to them, to be advised how her own wayward mate might be hospitalized and approached when next he stumbled.
31.
32.
To his wife, he remarked,
"Don't see anything the matter here, Ma. Ain't it grand the wind stopped blowin'?"
33.
There had been no real infidelity, for loyalty to
my wife, helped at times by extreme drunkenness, kept me out of those scrapes.
34.
The alcoholic, his wife,
his children, his "in-laws",
each one is likely to have fixed ideas about the family's attitude towards himself or herself.
35.
He interrupted to scoff
at this and asserted he'd fix
his wife, his partner, and
his alcoholism by himself.
36.
Nevertheless, I still
thought I could control
the situation, and there were periods of sobriety which renewed my wife's hope.
37.
It was the usual situation: home in jeopardy, wife ill, children distracted, bills in arrears and standing damaged.
38.
39.
Very gradually, and usually without any realization of the fact, the wife is forced to become the mother of an erring boy.
40.
His wife is one of those persons who really feels there is something rather sinful about these commodities, so she nagged, and her intolerance finally threw him into a fit of anger.
41.
42.
After the husband joins A.A., the wife may become discontented, even highly resentful that Alcoholics Anonymous has
done the very thing that all her years of devotion had failed to do.
43.
44.
45.
My wife -- misunderstands and nags;
likes Brown; wants the house put in her name -- pride; personal sex relations; security (fear).
46.
47.
I used to promise my wife, my friends, and my children that I would drink no more -- promises which seldom kept me sober even through the day, though I was very sincere when I made them.
48.
49.
Though he is now a most effective member of Alcoholics Anonymous, he
still smokes and drinks coffee, but neither his wife nor anyone else stands in judgment.
50.
It is probably true that you
and your husband have been living too much alone, for drinking many times isolates the wife of an alcoholic.
51.
52.
53.
About this time a lady called up my wife one Saturday afternoon saying she wanted me to come over that evening to meet a friend of hers who might help me.
54.
A doctor said to us, "Years of living with an alcoholic is almost sure to make any wife or child neurotic.
55.
56.
We cannot, for example, unload a detailed account of extramarital
adventuring upon the shoulders of our unsuspecting wife or husband.
57.
Some of us have taken very hard knocks to learn this truth: Job or no job --
wife or no wife -- we simply do not stop drinking so long as we place dependence upon other people ahead of dependence on God.
58.
But he is yet a long way from making good to the wife or parents whom for years he has
so shockingly treated.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
The wife usually goes on doing the best she knows how, but meanwhile the alcoholic
alternately loves and hates her maternal care.
67.
My wife was at work.
68.
My weary and despairing
wife was informed that it
would all end with heart failure during delirium tremens, or I would
develop a wet brain, perhaps within a year.
69.
If my wife was planning to
go out in the afternoon, I would get a large supply of liquor and smuggle it home and hide it in the coal bin, the clothes chute, over door jambs, over beams in the cellar, and in cracks in the cellar tile.
70.
Some of us have taken very hard knocks to learn this truth: Job or no job --
wife or no wife -- we simply do not stop drinking so long as we place dependence upon other people ahead of dependence on God.
71.
Nothing will help the man who is off on a spiritual tangent so much as the wife who adopts a sane spiritual program, making a better practical use of it.
72.
73.
But for every man who drinks others are involved -- the wife who trembles in fear of the next debauch; the mother and father who see their son wasting away.
74.
75.
He and his wife would leave elated by the thought of what
they could now do for some stricken acquaintance
and his family.
76.
He shouts that if his partner would treat him better, and his wife would leave him alone, he'd soon solve his alcohol problem.
The 164 and More™ Book, eBook, and Web Site
are all CONCORDANCES which display passages from the Big Book
Alcoholics Anonymous, the
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions,
and the A.A. Grapevine (A.A. Preamble only).
Sorting and rendering passages in the proprietary format of the
164 and More concordance does not in any way imply
affiliation with or endorsement by either Alcoholics Anonymous World Services
Inc., or the A.A. Grapevine, Inc. Further A.A.W.S. Inc. and the A.A.
Grapevine Inc. have no objection to the use of this material in the
164 and More concordance.
Copyright © 2005-2023, Recovery Press LLC; All Rights Reserved.