“What we craved was drugs. What we had was each other.”

“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.”

“This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it.”

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

“...it's not what people do, it's what they don't tell you they do. That's what hurts. That's what you think about when the television signs off and you're still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

“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.”

“This was the history of the world. Recovery and collapse, despair and relief. The dialectic of clean and dirty. Every time is worse than the time before. The bad things come, days and nights and days and nights get so unbelievably fucked up, unbelievably fast, but in the end-- if there is an end-- everybody's best self just slogs forward, one stagger, one fall, one day, one 'what the fuck just happened?' moment of oblivion and soul-broken joy at a time. All we have to do is not die.”