Mark Lanegan > Quotes

“If tears were liquor, I'd have drunk myself sick.”
― Mark Lanegan

“Before Layne, I saw everything in strict black and white. He was every beautiful shade of color on the wheel, as well as many that had never been seen before.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“It's hard to know where you are when you're trying to read a map by the light of a falling star.”
― Mark Lanegan, Devil in a Coma

“Each and every time I walked out into the dark, I only ever came part of the way back.”
― Mark Lanegan, Devil in a Coma

“I never joined an army, instead I fought an imaginary war my entire life and was the only casualty.”
― Mark Lanegan, Devil in a Coma

“That was my life in a nutshell: a stolen moment of desperate pleasure, an assful of tiny daggers, then an eternity of agony.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“I've never enjoyed being fully present, a muted reality has been the landscape I've preferred and mainly inhabited forever. Sure, feeling is good, but not too much, and if someone is able to get away with suffering devastating loss, massive regret, heartache, physical agony, mental instability, isolation, humiliation, abuse, incarceration, depression, tragedy etc. with a blanket of chemical protection, then who can say it's wrong?”
― Mark Lanegan, Devil in a Coma

“I was, in reality, driven by what I’d heard referred to in rehab all those years ago as “a thousand forms of fear.” Sadly, somewhere deep in my soul, I knew that was probably me.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“But it was the fear of showing my true heart, at times either so full it might burst or so empty I could cry, that hounded me most viciously. There had been a perpetual war between myself and the costume of persona I’d donned as a youngster and then worn my entire life. Petrified that someone might discover who I really was: merely a child inside the body of an adult.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“The harsh injustice of ageing and the helplessness of infirmity was more than I could take. I swore I would die before I ended up like that.”
― Mark Lanegan, Devil in a Coma

“Music was no longer my friend but I left my headphones on round the clock just to keep the outside noise out of my head.”
― Mark Lanegan, Devil in a Coma

“my eyes: my wasted childhood, my arrogant youth, my anger and obsessions, crime, delusions, self-loathing, paranoia, hopelessness, fury, and sad junkie downward spiral.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“I was, at the end of the day, a slow learner, an extremely slow learner afflicted with the lack of self-awareness to even realize it. I always thought I knew it all, but I was only ever motivated into action by one of two things: pleasure or pain.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“The myopia that largely dogged me my entire life kept me rooted in the here and now, and hardly anything else ever crossed my mind, especially if it was to take place in some far-off distant future never-never land. Such places did not exist in my limited scope of reality.”
― Mark Lanegan, Devil in a Coma

“This is God's country, or so it is said, but it is also death's country - don't forget that.”
― Mark Lanegan, Devil in a Coma

“The grueling brutality of the past two weeks’ events, no, the dysfunction of my entire life, all of it had brought me to this moment of supreme lunacy, confusing self-laceration, and pain. I faced a tidal wave of dopesickness that was going to obliterate me.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“I didn't leave a trace of myself with them, but they stained me.”
― Mark Lanegan, Devil in a Coma

“was running, raging, and drugging myself to death. A bitter, mountainous, unnamed, unrecognized, and poisonous grief melded with my rage. Rage pointed inward, and oftentimes fired wildly outward if I could find a semi-legitimate excuse to explode. Until then, I would silently kill anyone within range via silent, focused hatred. My mantra had become Die, motherfucker, die.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“I was compelled to ask a stranger to keep my secrets, but most addicts were keeping secrets from someone themselves.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“The word depression had never crossed my mind, never in relation to what I’d been going through, and, in fact, never at all in my entire life. It was not something in my limited categories of feelings, nor was it a characterization I’d have ascribed to myself. “I’m only depressed because no one can tell me what’s wrong with me.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“I was only ever motivated into action by one of two things: pleasure or pain.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“Nearly every single affair was ended by then woman I was with, not me, and they often left with another man and a knife in my back, which I always had coming. I was a natural at losing, but as soon as one thing ended I was already into something else.”
― Mark Lanegan, Devil in a Coma

“The only memories I could muster were all attached to something I'd rather forget. The future was an unpromising unknown, and I could only look to the long-dead past for comfort, but it seemed as though there was not one unsullied moment to grab onto. I had spent my life in the shadows, facilitating my own and others undoing, taking on nearly any dark task that came my way, every action a means to an end, the end being oblivion.”
― Mark Lanegan, Devil in a Coma

“heroin erased the myriad collection of endless worries that had kept me awake all night most of my life. It had freed me from feeling anything: loss, heartbreak, regret, grief, resentment, as well as the burning hatred and disgust I felt not only for myself but also for other people I thought had wronged me, real or imagined. When dope enveloped me in its golden glow, all that melted away like springtime snow. The world became black and white, boiled down to just getting enough drugs each day to keep the dogs of withdrawals off my heels. I felt as though heroin had saved me from a life of misery, and I was prepared to go to any lengths to make sure I would always have it. Heroin was my number one, and anything else—everything else—was such a far-distant second place as to be virtually unseen on the radar screen of my life’s importance.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“You sick SOB! You owe me a Bible, MF-er!” His angry, abbreviated expletives drew huge laughter from everyone on the bus. Turns out I had been rolling joints with pages torn from one of his personal Bibles. I’d not known where the book had come from and used it because it was all I could find.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“I turn back to the page to obsessively invent still more damaged and heroic versions of myself before the fire dies out or the well runs dry, constructing imaginary worlds.”
― Mark Lanegan, Devil in a Coma

“Some people experience freedom in being completely unhinged and lost out on the flip-side of polite society but it takes some balls, a battleship full of psychic willpower or flat-out insanity along with a shitload of stamina and a grip of self-hatred, but no brains at all to find it.”
― Mark Lanegan, Devil in a Coma

“...fuck stopping. I was going to get loaded immediately. The entire demented merry-go-round began to spin once more”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“My jealousy and bitter resentment over the painful, self-inflicted loss of my former love brought out a negative, sometimes violent reaction. My loss of Anna was still very much a raw, open wound.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“This illness also seemed to unlock something in my subconscious, and I was dreaming more than I had ever remembered doing before.”
― Mark Lanegan, Devil in a Coma