David Sheff > Quotes

“In his suicide note, Kurt Cobain wrote, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." He was quoting a Neil Young song about Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. When I was twenty-four, I interviewed John Lennon. I asked him about this sentiment, one that pervades rock and roll. He took strong, outraged exception to it. "It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out, " he said. "I worship people who survive. I'll take the living and the healthy.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie to you. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“A world of contradictions, wherein everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“We deny the severity of our loved one's problem not because we are naive, but because we can't know.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“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.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Fortunately I have a son, my beautiful boy
Unfortunately he is a drug addict.
Fortunately he is in recovery.
Unfortunately he relapses.
Fortunately he is in recovery again.
Unfortunately he relapses.
Fortunately he is not dead.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“How can both Nics, the loving and considerate and generous one, and the self-obsessed and self-destructive one, be the same person?”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“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.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Our children live or die with or without us. No matter what we do, no matter how we agonize or obsess, we cannot choose for our children whether they live or die. It is a devastating realization, but also liberating. I finally chose life for myself.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“I am becoming used to an overwhelming, grinding mixture of anger and worry...”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“I didn't cause it. I can't control it. I can't cure it.”
― David Sheff

“How innocent we are of our mistakes and how we responsible we are for them.”
― David Sheff

“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...”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Here's a note to the parents of addicted children: Choose your music carefully...There are millions of treacherous moments.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“That's when it struck me that I can't take my life as long as I can still laugh.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“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....”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“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.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“It may be true that suffering builds character, but it also damages people”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Some people may opt out. Their child turns out to be whatever it is that they find impossible to face—for some, the wrong religion; for some, the wrong sexuality; for some, a drug addict. They close the door. Click. Like in mafia movies: “I have no son. He is dead to me.” I have a son and he will never be dead to me.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Heartbreaking Memoir of a Father's Struggle with His Son's Addiction and the Journey to Recovery

“I would miss having Nic in my life. I would miss his funny phone messages and his humor, the stories, our talks, our walks, watching movies with him, dinners together, and the transcendent feeling between us that is love.
I would miss all of it.
I miss it now.
And here it sinks in: I don't have it now. I have not had it whenever Nic has been on drugs.
Nic is absent, only his shell remains. I have been afraid - terrified - to lose Nic, but I have lost him.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“But here’s the rub of addiction. By its nature, people afflicted are unable to do what, from the outside, appears to be a simple solution—don’t drink. Don’t use drugs. In exchange for that one small sacrifice, you will be given a gift that other terminally ill people would give anything for: life.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Heartbreaking Memoir of a Father's Struggle with His Son's Addiction and the Journey to Recovery

“He had black fingernails and drove a hearse. Everything about him cried out, 'Look at me, look at me,' and when you looked at him, he would snap, 'Who the fuck are you looking at?' If you subscribe to the idea that addiction is a disease, it is startling to see how many of these children- paranoid, anxious, bruised, tremulous, withered, in some cases psychotic - are seriously ill, slowly dying. We'd never allow such a scene if these kids had any other disease. They would be in a hospital, not on the streets.”
― David Sheff

“Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“It is still so easy to forget that addiction is not curable. It is a lifelong disease that can go into remission, that is manageable if the one who is stricken does the hard, hard work, but it is incurable.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Heartbreaking Memoir of a Father's Struggle with His Son's Addiction and the Journey to Recovery

“Don’t confront me with my failures. I have not forgotten them.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“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.”
― David Sheff

“Nic is writing 'I am sorry', and I want to cry. No, I think, don't let him in again. No don't let him in again. No don't let him in again.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Fortunately I have a son, my beautiful boy.
Unfortunately he is a drug addict.
Fortunately he is in recovery.
Unfortunately he relapses.
Fortunately he is in recovery again.
Unfortunately he relapses.
Fortunately he is in recovery again.
Unfortunately he relapses.
Fortunately he is not dead.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction