“There were mornings I thought drugs made me insane and mornings I thought they kept me from going that way.”

“This was, I sometimes thought, the last gift my father gave me. And the best: His death stood out as the supreme-o excuse for fucking up, for being a successful fuck-up.”

“I think that a lot of people are in love with stress. It's the dirty little secret of Western civilization. People often mistake stress for fuel.... to me, stress is just another bad drug that I don't want to do.”

“I kept getting high to kill my shame at the fact that I kept getting high.”

“From diapers on, I felt like there was something not good about me, but it was invisible to everybody but my mother. And whenever she looked at me, she had to let me know that she knew. That was her mission in life.”

“I wasn't sad after my father kissed the streetcar. If anything, it was a relief. Much as I missed him, his dying gave me an excuse to feel the way I already felt. Which was the way I felt right now, under the laundry room fluorescents: hollow, pissed off, wanting to be wherever I wasn't. Until I got there. Then I wanted to be somewhere else.”

“Not until I stopped doing drugs altogether did I feel like a man. Not until I walked out of that fire did I have any idea what the word even meant.”