Darien Mounts > Darien's Quotes

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self esteem.”
― Kurt Cobain

“I was more addicted to self destruction then to the drugs themselves ... something very romantic about it”
― Gerard Way

“...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Sometimes he missed the numbed, walking-underwater feeling feel that the cocktail of narcotics used to give him. But if a situation went down in here, he was going to need all of his wits to get out of it.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“One of the things that strikes me most though is how some people don't realise they're self-harming. The phrase 'self-harm' brings up thoughts of 'cutting', but that's only a small portion of it. When you drink excessively to drown your sorrows to the point you throw up and can't see straight and/or, like a girl at my school, ended up being driven to hospital to have her stomach pumped, you've brought harm to yourself. If you take drugs to feel numb and it becomes an addiction that you can't break, you've self-harmed. When you starve yourself or binge eat to fit the latest fashions, you're pushing your body further than it can go.
We need to start treating ourselves how we deserve to be treated, even if you feel that no one else does. Prove to the world you ARE worth something by treating yourself with the utmost respect and hope that other people will follow your example. And even if they don't, at least one person in the world is treating you well: YOU.”
― Carrie Hope Fletcher, All I Know Now: Wonderings and Reflections on Growing Up Gracefully

“I didn't care if he was a genius or a fucking idiot, he was rotting away, and it wasn't fun to watch.”
― Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue

“Imagine trying to live without air.
Now imagine something worse.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Do you remember? Do you remember being solid? Do you remember life before the hole? Before you were empty and needed to be filled? There was a time when everything was enough. There was a time you didn't try to get out of your own skin. Remember?”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Even though I'm sleeping again, everything still feels a little rickety, like I'm here but not quite here, like I'm just a stand-in for my real self, like someone could just reach over and pinch me and I'd deflate. I thought I was feeling better, but I don't know anymore.”
― Amy Reed, Crazy

“And that's when it hits me, the punch in the stomach, the carving out of my insides. That's when I realize that none of this is a movie. I will not go out with a bang. There is no ending. There are no credits. I will wake up and I will keep waking up and this will always be waiting for me.”
― Amy Reed, Beautiful

“Before there was Cocaine or vodka or sex or any of that, there was fantasy. There was escape. That was my first addiction. I remember being a little kid and imagining everything different, myself different. How did I get the idea in my head at age eight that everything was better somewhere else? Why would a child have a hole inside that can't get full no matter what she does? The real world could never make me happy, so I retreated to the world inside my head. And as I grew, as the real world proved itself more and more painful, the fantasy world expanded.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Do you remember? Do you remember the world before the poison?”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“There is a picture of me in their heads, a picture of someone I don't know yet. She is not the chubby girl with the braces and bad perm. She is not the girl hiding in the bathroom at recess. She is someone new, a blank slate they have named beautiful. That is what I am now: beautiful, with this new body and face and hair and clothes. Beautiful, with this erasing of history.”
― Amy Reed, Beautiful

“They are ghosts of people I never knew, which the rain will wash away.”
― Amy Reed, Beautiful

“If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.”
― Bill Hicks

“Selling my soul would be a lot easier if I could just find it.”
― Nikki Sixx, The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star

“when you can’t climb your way out of such a hole, you tend to crouch down and call it home…”
― Nikki Sixx, The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star

“Love those who hurt you the most, because they are probably the ones closest to you.
They, too, are on a path, and just like you they are learning to walk before they can fly. Imagine if everybody you hurt in life turned their backs on you? You would be playing a hell of a lot of solitaire.
Love them no matter what.”
― Nikki Sixx, This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography, And Life Through The Distorted Lens Of Nikki Sixx

“I was so happy every morning when I woke up that I was pissing smiley faces.”
― Nikki Sixx, The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star

“Friends tell each other what nobody else is willing to tell you.”
― Nikki Sixx, This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography, And Life Through The Distorted Lens Of Nikki Sixx

“When I looked into her eyes, I saw an invisible spirit of something that I already loved.”
― Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue

“When you start putting pen to paper, you see a side of your personal truth that doesn't otherwise reveal itself in conversation or thought.”
― Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue

“I stopped hating and started just being. My whole life, I had been the most defensive person you'd meet, unable to tolerate any criticism. But now I started listening and being.”
― Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue

“One of the better definitions of insanity - doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting the result to be different.”
― Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue

“There's a peculiar thing that happens every time you get clean. You go through this sensation of rebirth. There's something intoxicating about the process of the comeback, and that becomes an element in the whole cycle of addiction. Once you've beaten yourself down with cocaine and heroin, and you manage to stop and walk out of the muck you begin to get your mind and body strong and reconnect with your spirit. The oppressive feeling of being a slave to the drugs is still in your mind, so by comparison, you feel phenomenal. You're happy to be alive, smelling the air and seeing the beauty around you...You have a choice of what to do. So you experience this jolt of joy that you're not where you came from and that in and of itself is a tricky thing to stop doing. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you know that every time you get clean, you'll have this great new feeling.

Cut to: a year later, when you've forgotten how bad it was and you don't have that pink-cloud sensation of being newly sober. When I look back, I see why these vicious cycles can develop in someone who's been sober for a long time and then relapses and doesn't want to stay out there using, doesn't want to die, but isn't taking the full measure to get well again. There's a concept in recovery that says 'Half-measures avail us nothing.' When you have a disease, you can't take half the process of getting well and think you're going to get half well; you do half the process of getting well, you're not going to get well at all, and you'll go back to where you came from. Without a thorough transformation, you're the same guy, and the same guy does the same shit. I kept half-measuring it, thinking I was going to at least get something out of this deal, and I kept getting nothing out of it”
― Anthony Keidis, Scar Tissue

“That's a spiritual lifestyle, being willing to admit that you don't know everything and that you were wrong about some things. It's about making a list of all the people you've harmed, either emotionally or physically or financially, and going back and making amends. That's a spiritual lifestyle. It's not a fluffy ethereal concept.”
― Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue