Junkie Quotes

“The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.
The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict. (Junky, Prologue, p. xxxviii)”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“I didn't realize there was a ranking." I said. "Sadie frowned. "What do you mean?" "A ranking," I said. "You know, what's crazier than what." "Oh, sure there is," Sadie said. She sat back in her chair. "First you have your generic depressives. They're a dime a dozen and usually pretty boring. Then you've got the bulimics and the anorexics. They're slightly more interesting, although usually they're just girls with nothing better to do. Then you start getting into the good stuff: the arsonists, the schizophrenics, the manic-depressives. You can never quite tell what those will do. And then you've got the junkies. They're completely tragic, because chances are they're just going to go right back on the stuff when they're out of here." "So junkies are at the top of the crazy chain," I said. Sadie shook her head. "Uh-uh," she said. "Suicides are." I looked at her. "Why?" "Anyone can be crazy," she answered. "That's usually just because there's something screwed up in your wiring, you know? But suicide is a whole different thing. I mean, how much do you have to hate yourself to want to just wipe yourself out?”
― Michael Thomas Ford

“A junkie spends half his life waiting.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Hip - Someone who knows the score. Someone who understands "jive talk." Someone who is "with it." The expression is not subject to definition because, if you don't "dig" what it means, no one can ever tell you.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, fightened flesh.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“I wait on my fix:
I am a poetry junkie.”
― Charles Bukowski, Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit

“He really is a cunt ay the first order. Nae about that. The big problem is, he's a mate na aw. Whit kin ye dae?”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“For some people quitting foods, say chocolate, can be as hard as kicking heroin is for a junkie. Food hooks people by triggering the exact chemical reactions triggered in the brain by hard drugs. Or nicotine. Or alcohol. Or shopping. Or sex.”
― Rebecca Skloot

“High cunts are a big fuckin drag when yir feeling like this, because thir too busy enjoying their high tae notice or gie a fuck about your suffering. Whereas the piss-held in the pub wants every cunt tae git as ootay it as he is, the real junky (as opposed tae the casual user who wants a partner-in-crime) doesnae gie a fuck aboot anybody else.”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“It wasn't as if crack was getting great press in the South Bronx in 1999, but it took a particular kind of idiot to wake up one day and say, 'Angel dust is a product I've heard nothing but good about, and it's about time I was involved.”
― Edward Conlon, Blue Blood by Conlon, Edward (2004) Paperback

“I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means of increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.”
― William S. Burroughs

“The world network of junkies, tuned on a cord of rancid jissom, tying up in furnished rooms, shivering in the junk-sick morning.”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“The junkie ignites his feelings with ugly synthetic substances, and the emotions that were meant to last for a lifetime burn away in full force in a couple of short years.”
― Plamen Chetelyazov, Flaws of Oblivion

“They sky was streaked with the marks of sundown. A jet trail glowed in the ugliest pink. My eyes felt raw. The Windowpane had twisted time so badly. The day had seemed a minute long but in that minute my life uncoiled.”
― Lynda Barry, Cruddy

“I Write. I Vlog. I Potter hard-core.”
― Ama A-Badu

“Automatically, I eyed her slim, full-breasted figure and swallowed. For a junkie, this girl was put together. For anybody, this girl was put together.”
― Michael McCretton

“Stop being an adrenaline junkie who is waiting for the happy ending instead of seeing the happy being.”
― Andrea T. Goeglein, Don't Die Waiting to Be Brave

“I started to develop a penchant for the odd hot foil of smack. After all those years of calling junkies ‘the scum of the earth’, I had now fallen by the wayside and had become a junkie myself!”
― Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child

“They sky was streaked with the marks of sundown. A jet trail glowed in the ugliest pink. My eyes felt raw. The Windowpane had twisted time so badly. The had seemed a minute long but in that minute my life uncoiled.”
― Lynda Barry, Cruddy

“Tears dripped down my face as I realized He died for me when I was at my worst. He didn’t die for a good, well-put-together man, He loved and died for a junkie kid who was selfish. Not only did He die for me when I was snorting ketamine off a girl’s butt and being a sleaze bag, but He made sure she sat on the ketamine so that when I snorted it, there wasn’t enough to kill me.”
― Michael J Heil, Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose

“It occurred to me often that to be a user in New York was to lay oneself open to a whole system of threats, not only legal; for my mind always came back as I looked down at the little heap of whitish powder to wonder what an analyst would find there. The horse is cut with all manner of adulterous powders, until, at the average user's end, there remains 3% heroin. You can usually count on 3%. But there are times when codeine or even a barbiturate is substituted for the real thing. . . so long as they stun you, they calculate. And so you look to cop again, at once, and so it goes on. To administer an overdose a pusher has only substantially to raise the percentage of heroin in what he gives you. When you turn blue your friends try to bring you round and if they cannot they discuss how to have your body discovered elsewhere, away from their pad so as not to bring the heat on them. An occasional corpse is found in a parking lot.”
― Alexander Trocchi, Cain's Book

“That was a defining fucking moment of my life. The moment I realized she wasn't coming back. That's when I learned you can never trust anybody, but you can always trust them to be who they are.
And my mom was a junkie.”
― Emily McIntire, Beneath the Stars