Quotes from David Carr

And here might be the moment to squirt one perfect tear, all bittersweet and shimmering with dreamy resignation. Except that as the serpent once sunned its coils in Eden, patiently awaiting the opportunity to let the biggest cat in eternity out of the sturdiest bag, so a pack of Camel cigarettes stands in these wings, waiting to come on and do its most unexpected stuff.

The future is even more fungible than the past: We can make it up, assert it will be so, and no one can say it won't happen with any surety. Herman Melville, in talking about history, said that the past is the textbook of tyrants, while the future is the bible of the free.

My kids became mine through a series of overt acts

I knew they were mine because they became so in tiny steps across my soul.

Eddie is a man in all that noun means.

One by one, my pals from the old days drifted away, checking on me every once in a while and, seeing that there was nothing to be done—I would not listen to anyone at the time, no matter what they said—eventually leaving me to my obsession.

Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them.

But being an addict means that you never stipulate to being an adult. You may, as the occasion requires, adopt the trade dress of a grown-up, showing responsibility and gravitas in spurts to get by, but the rest of the time, you do what you want when you want.

You can't become normal by pretending you are.

To the extent I am good at anything other than falling down, it is getting back up, at overcoming low expectations—many of them my own—to do things I didn't think I was capable of.

It was a daylight waterfall of regret known to all addicts. It can't get worse, but it does. When the bottom arrives, the cold fact of it all, it is always a surprise. Over fiteen years, I had made a seemingly organic journey from pothead to party boy, from knockaround guy to friendless thug. At thirty-one, I was washed out of my profession, morally and physically corrupt, but I still had almost a year left in the Life. I wasn't done yet.

Even if I had amazing recall, and I don't, recollection is often just self-fashioning. Some of it is reflexive, designed to bury truths that cannot be swallowed, but other "memories" are just redemption myths writ small. Personal narrative is not simply opening up a vein and letting the blood flow toward anyone willing to stare. The historical self is created to keep dissonance at bay and render the subject palatable in the present.

Memory becomes not a faculty but a coconspirator, a tool for constructing the self that we show the world.

Sometimes addiction seems more like possession, a death grip from Satan that requires supernatural intervention. Absolution from end-stage chemical obsession tends to force otherwise faithless men to their knees.)

Hope is oxygen to someone who is suffocating on despair.

Rats—humans too—continue to push on the bar in the cage of our existence looking for a reward past the point of reason because, every once in a while, something unthinkably delicious comes down the tube.

Tucked in safe suburban redoubts, kids who had it soft like me manufactured peril.

coming. Our friendship—the nascent journalist and the wizened asphalt guy hanging out—was one small expression of the pub theory of life, that we are all of a common fabric once we have a pint in our hands. Or, by extension, a line of coke between us.

I am safe—I am safe—yes—if I be not fool enough to make open confession!" —EDGAR ALLAN POE, "THE IMP OF THE PERVERSE

To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs—you need, actually—to keep them at one remove. How, then, to reassemble that montage of deceit into a truthful past?

Chemicals define a vast swath of intimate relationships in the modern world. The doleful, uninvolved husband who works through a twelve-pack in front of the TV and side trips to the garage to visit a pint of vodka. The wife whose headaches require a steady stream of Klonopin. The fifth-grade daughter who is wired on Adderal. The teenager who sustains himself with one-hitters in his bedroom. Ships passing in a mood-altered murk, each regarding the other through the lens of pharmacology.

Even if I had amazing recall, and I don't, recollection is often just self-fashioning. Some of it is reflexive, designed to bury truths that can not be swallowed, but other "memories" are just redemption myths writ small. Personal narrative is not simply opening up a vein and letting the blood flow toward anyone willing to share. The historical self is created to keep dissonance at bay and render the subject palatable in the present.

When there is no edge, we make our own, reaching for something that would approximate the cliché of being fully alive because we could die at any minute. That search for sensation leads to the self divorcing from the body, à la Descartes, and a life of faux peril. Everything that brought me joy involved risk.

Every addict is formed in the crucible of the memory of that first hit.