Quotes from David Sheff

You've got to wonder what Jesus was like at seventeen," Anne Lamott wrote. "They don't even talk about it in the Bible, he was apparently so awful.

I accept evil in order to participate in the miraculous.

It must be like a soldier in a trench during a bombing raid. I've shut down every nonessential emotion—worry, fear—concentrating every neuron in my new brain on the moment in order to stay alive.

Why do I want to meet him? No matter how unrealistic, I retain a sliver of hope that I can get through to him. That's not quite accurate. I know I can't, but at least I can put my fingertips on his cheek.

Thomas Lynch showed me that it is possible to love a child who is lost, possibly forever.

Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.

I keep a box in which I store his artwork and writings, like his response to an assignment in which he has been asked if you should always try your best. "I don't think you should always try your best all the time," he writes, "because, let's say a drug atick asks you for drugs you should not try your best to find him some drugs." Another assignment that goes into the box is

You're as sick as your secrets.

For heroin users with a five-year history of addiction, it may take ten or fifteen years to help them come out of it, but if you start when they're twenty-five, by the time they're forty they're pretty much rehabbed. If you don't, most of them burn out by forty.

Love cannot exist for long without the dimension of justice.

Gunpei Yokoi, asked his boss, 'What should I make?' Nintendo chief executive Hiroshi Yamauchi replied, 'Something great.' Game Over Nintendo's Battle to Dominate Videogames

I am a sucker to contemplate opening to the idea of healing.

And yet every time I think I can't take any more, I do.

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. I chose the perilous but essential path that allows me to accept that Nic will decide for himself how—and whether—he will live his life.

I wish someone had shaken me and said, "Intervene while you can before it's too late." It may not have made a difference, but I don't know.

I also know that parents have discretionary recall, blocking out everything that contradicts our carefully edited recollections - an understandable attempt to dodge blame. Conversely, children often fixate on the indelibly painful memories, because they have made a stronger impression

The constellation of these impulses that we call love feels like a miracle. The miracles do not cancel out evil, but I accept evil in order to participate in the miraculous.

But you know, I don't think I would be so scared to die. I think it's like today—the end of a vacation, when you are ready to go home.

Sometimes, it strikes me that life goes on, but it does, inexorably.

teenagers are almost a different species than the rest of us, particularly in social situations.

Substance abusers lie about everything, and usually do an awesome job of it." Stephen King once wrote. "It's the liar's disease." Nic once told me, quoting an AA platitude, "An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie about it. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it." Part of me is convinced that he actually believes that he will find it for you.

I pray even as the news in the papers makes my prayer seem insignificant in scale and wholly selfish. There is a devastating hurricane and flooding and suicide bombers and crashes and tsunamis and terrorism and cancer and war—endless and brutal war—disease and famine and earthquakes and everywhere there is addiction, and today the heavens must be overwhelmed with the noise of all the prayers. Here is one more. Please God heal Nic. Please God heal Nic. The

O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts.

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. I chose the perilous but essential path that allows me to accept that Nic will decide for himself how—and whether—he will live his life.