“The good news is that by the second year, those cravings were about as half as frequent, and by the third year, half as much again. I'm still a little bent, a little crooked, but all things crooked, I can't complain. After all those years of all kinds of abuse and crashing into trees at eighty miles an hour and jumping off buildings and living through overdoses and liver disease, I feel better now than I did ten years ago. I might have some scar tissue, but that's alright, I'm still making progress. ”

“I'm still a little bent, a little crooked, but all things considered, I can't complain.”

“I kept going deeper and deeper into this world of repetition...The sad thing is, people don't want to believe that the person they're in love with is out of his mind, drinking and using, so if you give them even half an excuse, they're going to want to believe it. A girl with no prior exposure to the disease had to be blissfully unaware of the nefarious tricks of the dope fiend. That's how I was able to get high all summer and autumn and pretend like it wasn't happening. I was saying, 'I'm sick.' I was deteriorating physically and emotionally. Jaime was tolerant, and it did speak well of her character, because she was not the type to abandon ship during a crisis. She didn't consider backing off or bowing out, she was just there, which I can't say about everybody. I don't know if I could say it even about myself.”

“Flea, you can't quit," I pleaded. "I'm going tо be the JamesBrown of the eighties.”

“You instinctively know that nothing will ever be the same, and you have to carry that knowledge around with you like a huge weight. The next time you see your girl, you can’t look her straight in the eyes the same way you did for all those years.”

“Having gone through it all had changed our outlooks. You can't be as much of a bitch as you were before, you can't be as much as an egomaniac, you can't feel as much like the world owed you something, you can't be the 'where's mine?' guy.”

“She was probably the girl I loved the most of all my girlfriends, but also the toughest one to make things work out with. If I had put that much effort into any of my other relationships, I'd be married with five kids now.”