“This book, for me, is less an exercise in recall than exorcism.”

“The point is, everything, bad or good, boils back to the decade on the needle, and the years before that imbibing everything from cocaine to Romilar, pot to percs, LSD to liquid meth and a pharmacy in between: a lifetime spent altering the single niggling fact that to be alive means being conscious. More or less.”

“Being a junkie, when you broke it down, was nothing more than a crazed day job.”

“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.”

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

“To me, God is like this happy bus driver.”

“Nothing ever turns me on so much in a woman as unhappiness.”