David Carr

“[C]ivilians are equally bewildering to the addict. I've watched people drink a glass and a half of wine and push away the rest. What exactly is the point of that?”

“This is the point where the knowing, irony-infused author laughs along with his readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity Kool-Aid. That's some other book. Slogans saved my life. All of them--the dumb ones, the preachy ones, the imperatives, the cliches, the injunctives, the gooey, Godly ones, the shameless, witless ones.”

“End-stage addiction is mostly about waiting for the police, or someone, to come and bury you in your shame.”

“When I was very little, my dad would tell me stories about "Billy the Lucky Pup." Billy's doggie buddies were constantly getting in jams, careening toward the brink of something, and Billy would always, always come charging over the hill. With no more than a "ruff, ruff," he would signal that the cavalry had arrived - that Billy was on the case, and disaster had once again been avoided. In those months of relentless havoc, I'd arrive at an odd moment of consideration, and I would think, Where the fuck is that dog, anyway?”

“Some of the burdens we carry include false weight, perhaps to make up for all the horrible stuff we actually did and forgot.”

“As I sit today, I am a genuine, often pleasant person. I am able to imitate a human being for long spurts of time, do solid work for a reputable organization, and have, over the breadth of time, proven to be an attentive father and husband. So how to reconcile my past with my current circumstances? Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them. Was I faking it then, or am I faking it now? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I make up?”

“Most of my stories are not nice ones, their heroic aspects dimmed by the fact that the hand which struck me was my own. Truly ennobling narratives describe a person overcoming the bad hand that fate has dealt him, not someone like me, who takes good cards and sets them on fire.”

“The onset of adulthood is an organic, creeping process. No one wakes up one day and decides, "Lo, on this day I shall forever put away childish things and begin clipping coupons to go to Wal-Mart.”

“In the Ebbinghaus curve, or forgetting curve, R stands for memory retention, s is the relative strength of memory and t is time. The power of a memory can be built through repetition, but it is the memory we are recalling when we speak, not the event. And stories are annealed in the telling, edited by turns each time they are recalled...People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived.”

“It wasn't that I wanted to be a writer; I just didn't want to be stupid.”

“If marriage is about deciding to love on a daily basis, I have woken up to a no-brainer every day since.”

“The eyes that saw too much because they did not close enough.”

“But I've seen enough to know that we all carry a measure of guilt and innocence among us.”

“...that explains everything and excuses nothing.”

“Truth is singular and lies are plural, but history - the facts of what happened is both immutable and mostly unknowable.”

“Memories are like that. They live between synapses and between the people who hold them. Memories, even epic ones, are perishable from their very formation even in people who don't soak their brains in mood-altering chemicals. There is only so much space on any one person's hard drive, and old memories are prone to replacement by newer ones.”

“We tell ourselves that we lie to protect others, but the self usually comes out looking damn good in the process.”

“The trick of enjoying New York is not to be so busy grinding your way to the center of the earth that you fail to notice the sparkle of the place, a scale and a kind of wonder that puts all human endeavors in their proper place.”

“Coming from Minnesota, a land of white people who eat white food in a frequently white landscape, Chocolate City, with its black middle class, political leadership, and cultural legacy was a complete mystery to me.”

“There is no such thing as a social crack user.”

“Necessity is a mother.”

“I now inhabit a life I don't deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn't end any time soon”