“The emptiness where I used pain to fill the hole no longer controls me, no longer calls me because of you.”

“The life I walk binds my hands it makes me take things that I don’t understand I walk this dark world unknowing of what they hold true, forgetting the me I once knew, until you. The life I walk eternally was all I knew nothing more held me here to this earth until you. I feel the pain of every heart I take I feel the desire to replace all that I have grown to hate Darkness holds me close but the light still draws my empty soul The emptiness where I used pain to fill the hole no longer controls me, no longer calls me because of you.”

“I know a bit about the loss of dignity. I know that when you take away a man's dignity there is a hole, a deep black hole filled with despair, humiliation and self-hatred, filled with emptiness, shame and disgrace, filled with loss and isolation and hell. It's a deep, dark, horrible fucking hole, and that hole is where people like me live our sad-ass, fucked-up, dignity free, inhuman lives, and where we die, alone, miserable, wasted and forgotten.”

“And no power on earth could tell whether their blankly indifferent eyes were shutters protecting hidden treasures at the bottom of shafts no longer to be mined, or were merely gaping holes of the parasite's emptiness never to be filled.”

“My heart was beating so hard that for a second I thought I might pass out. It was like revisiting the hole where you'd once been held in solitary confinement: a force field of muscle-memory-stored pain and toxic energy so palpable I was afraid that if I stayed any longer it might suck me back in.”

“It took me one more year to admit that I could no longer control my drinking. And finally on July 7, 1986, I quit, and let a bunch of sober alcoholics teach me how to get sober, and stay sober. God, they were such a pain in the ass.”