David Sheff quotes:

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  • ... Gunpei Yokoi, asked his boss, 'What should I make?' Nintendo chief executive Hiroshi Yamauchi replied, 'Something great.'Game Over Nintendo's Battle to Dominate Videogames

  • How can both Nics, the loving and considerate and generous one, and the self-obsessed and self-destructive one, be the same person?

  • Openness is the first step toward recovery... addiction remains a secret because of the overwhelming shame associated with it.

  • Through Nic's drug addiction, I have learned that parents can bear almost anything....I shock myself with my ability to rationalize and tolerate things once unthinkable. The rationalizations escalate....It's only marijuana. He gets high only on weekends. At least he's not using hard drugs....

  • At my worst, I even resented Nic because an addict, at least when high, has a momentary respite from his suffering. There is no similar relief for parents or children or husbands or wives or others who love them.

  • I didn't cause it. I can't control it. I can't cure it.

  • The hopeful part about that is when you do have that help, you will feel better. It still doesn't make this easy. Nothing makes this easy, but you can make better decisions.

  • An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie to you. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.

  • Why does it help to read others' stories? It is not only that misery loves company, because (I learned) misery is too self-absorbed to want much company. Others' experiences did help with my emotional struggle...

  • Wherever you be, wherever you may, seek the truth, strive for the beautiful, achieve the good.

  • This stigma associated with drug use--the belief that bad kids use, good kids don't, and those with full-blown addiction are weak, dissolute, and pathetic--has contributed to the escalation of use and has hampered treatment more than any single other factor.

  • Jasper, who is six, is the only one of us who responds appropriately. He wails, inconsolable for an hour.

  • Sometimes I am all right. Is this what they call letting go? I have let go, if letting go means I am all right sometimes.

  • Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.

  • When I transformed my random and raw words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters, a semblance of order and sanity appeared where there had been only chaos and insanity.

  • A world of contradictions, wherein everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white.

  • How innocent we are of our mistakes and how we responsible we are for them.

  • I'm not sure if I know any 'functional' families, if functional means a family without difficult times and members who don't have a full range of problems.

  • We deny the severity of our loved one's problem not because we are naive, but because we can't know.

  • I am becoming used to an overwhelming, grinding mixture of anger and worry...

  • Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying

  • Here's a note to the parents of addicted children: Choose your music carefully...There are millions of treacherous moments.

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