Mishka Shubaly > Quotes

“Never make the mistake of thinking that alcoholics are weak, because it took an incredible amount of internal strength and conviction in order for me to keep drinking despite the growing mountain of evidence against it.”
― Mishka Shubaly, The Long Run

“If you talk to little kids about drugs, they tell you that drugs make you feel weird and act crazy and hang around with strange people. Getting sober and running long distances has been deeply bizarre, weirder than any drug or combination of drugs I’ve tried. I do things now that my friends find crazier than doing drugs I’ve found on the floor or sleeping in the street.”
― Mishka Shubaly, The Long Run

“Acedia is sorrow so complete that the flesh pervails completely over the spirit. You don't just turn your back on the world, you turn your back on God. You don't care, and you don't care that you don't care.”
― Mishka Shubaly, The Long Run

“It’s taken me years to realize that a confused man can inflict much more damage than an evil one.”
― Mishka Shubaly, Beat The Devil

“I got better the way everyone gets better: by trial and error and error and error, by fumbling around and making mistakes but not giving up and working incredibly hard at it every day and eventually, through a painful and laborious process of eliminating every wrong turn, finding my way.”
― Mishka Shubaly, The Long Run

“Better my knees end early from overuse than my life end early from underuse.”
― Mishka Shubaly, The Long Run

“There is no Google maps app for your life. There is no clearly marked destination — a blue dot — with an illuminated purple line showing you the correct path, where you should go and how you should get there and when you have deviated from it. And that really sucks.”
― Mishka Shubaly, The Long Run

“What’s the secret to my miraculous recovery, you might ask? Well, there is no secret because there has been no miracle. I got better the way everyone gets better: by trial and error and error and error, by fumbling around and making mistakes but not giving up and working incredibly hard at it every day and eventually, through a painful and laborious process of eliminating every wrong turn, finding my way. For me, the hardest part was”
― Mishka Shubaly, The Long Run & Other True Stories

“But boy, I really learned a lot from this one. One of the things I learned is that when someone says "I really learned a lot," what they mean is "Holy shit, did that ever hurt.”
― Mishka Shubaly, Are You Lonesome Tonight?

“Sometimes when you're conflicted about something, rather than make a clear decision, I find it's best to half-ass it and let the universe decide for you.”
― Mishka Shubaly, Bachelor Number One

“Searching for a better description of this rotting sadness, I came upon the concept of acedia. In Christian theology, it’s an antecedent to sloth, the least sexy of the seven deadly sins. Thomas Aquinas winnowed it down for me: acedia is sorrow so complete that the flesh prevails completely over the spirit. You don’t just turn your back on the world, you turn your back on God. You don’t care, and you don’t care that you don’t care.”
― Mishka Shubaly, The Long Run

“I say I don’t want children, people act as if I slapped my mother. I don’t want to have children. I just don’t. My excuses for not having children are legion: I can’t justify my own value system to myself, so I don’t feel a burning urge to program it into someone else. I’m not prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to be a good parent. I have enough of a working knowledge of bloodthirsty capitalism to know that it would be a brutal uphill slog for my child. I’ve read the science on climate change, and I believe we’re past the tipping point and that it’s about to get really hot, wet, crowded, and miserable. There are millions of unwanted children, and I don’t feel the need to create a clone with depressive, alcoholic genes. I don’t want to care about someone so much that I could not survive their death. But in the end, the reason I keep coming back to, the reason I don’t want children, is I don’t want children. It’s clear to me.”
― Mishka Shubaly, Of Mice and Me

“If love were a drug, I would have only ever tried it once. Even then, I probably would have threatened physical violence until I got my money back.”
― Mishka Shubaly, Are You Lonesome Tonight?

“My classmates got cars or summer vacations to Europe for graduation. My mom gave me a tent. My father didn’t call.”
― Mishka Shubaly, I Swear I'll Make It Up to You: A Life on the Low Road

“Chilling as it must be to watch someone die, it must be more chilling to watch yourself die in her eyes.”
― Mishka Shubaly, I Swear I'll Make It Up to You: A Life on the Low Road

“I’d clawed my way through college to discover that the world was a high school.”
― Mishka Shubaly, I Swear I'll Make It Up to You: A Life on the Low Road

“It seemed bleakly ironic to me that someone who craved, deserved and had worked so hard to earn a tragic, early death appeared to be doomed to live forever.”
― Mishka Shubaly, The Long Run

“should I stop? No. That was my weak self, the one who whined and cried and drank in bed.”
― Mishka Shubaly, I Swear I'll Make It Up to You: A Life on the Low Road

“millions of other people had been feeling alone at the same time. We had been alone together.”
― Mishka Shubaly, I Swear I'll Make It Up to You: A Life on the Low Road

“This great big excitable puppy dog of a guy who was totally falling apart.”
― Mishka Shubaly, I Swear I'll Make It Up to You: A Life on the Low Road

“A small, exquisitely painful truth came to me. Nothing bad had ever happened to me.”
― Mishka Shubaly, I Swear I'll Make It Up to You: A Life on the Low Road

“wondering if Izgi missed me, wondering if Allison ever missed me, wondering if anyone ever missed me.”
― Mishka Shubaly, I Swear I'll Make It Up to You: A Life on the Low Road

“I loved her in public, and I loved her in private, gasping underneath me. I loved her asleep, her eyelids fluttering in a dream, loved her so much that I missed her even while I was beside her, while I was inside her. But . . . was this it? Were we just to go on loving each other forever?”
― Mishka Shubaly, I Swear I'll Make It Up to You: A Life on the Low Road

“There was one person I had abused above all others, a person who had elicited ornate cruelty from me, a person who had lived with my foot on his throat for years: me. And if that was true, how to apologize, how to forgive?”
― Mishka Shubaly, I Swear I'll Make It Up to You: A Life on the Low Road

“it will kill you to fucking death, over and over, again and again. And you will go on living.”
― Mishka Shubaly, I Swear I'll Make It Up to You: A Life on the Low Road

“It’s much easier to accede to the grim fact of an early death than it is to deal with the long, fumbling open question of what to do with your life.”
― Mishka Shubaly, The Long Run

“I had battled my way through the mind-bending variety of horrors of the Ninth Circle of Hell to achieve not Heaven or Earth or even Purgatory but just the Eight Circle of Hell. Still, progress is progress.”
― Mishka Shubaly, The Long Run

“I didn’t have enough to pay the full fare, just a $20 Jens had stuffed in my hand.”
― Mishka Shubaly, I Swear I'll Make It Up to You: A Life on the Low Road

“Did red hair somehow react to the sun, as certain species of fish only breed under a full moon?”
― Mishka Shubaly, I Swear I'll Make It Up to You: A Life on the Low Road

“I have a secret life that's secret only to me. It's the nights I can't remember that I'm remembered for.”
― Mishka Shubaly, Are You Lonesome Tonight?