Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing: 'A candid, darkly funny book' New York Times

Nobody has a drinking problem and then stops and then drinks socially and it’s fine. The disease just picks up.

I guess the lesson is, take every opportunity, because something might come of it.

Know more, say less.

I’m not the biggest fan of confrontation. I ask a lot of questions. Just not out loud.

Panic set in. My bag was full. I was not high. There was nothing separating me from me. I felt like a little kid scared of monsters in the dark. But was I the monster?

idea, you give the drug to the child, the child stops crying. It was a different time. There I was, on the knee of my stressed mother, screaming over her twenty-one-year-old shoulder as some dinosaur in a white coat, barely looking up from his wide oak desk, tutted under his bad breath at “parents these days,” and wrote a script for a major addicti

Find a friend who’ll quit something with you—you’ll be amazed what that does for a friendship.

nature, when a penguin is injured, the other penguins group around it and prop it up until it’s better.

If you give me all the OxyContin I can stand, I feel taken care of, and when I’m taken care of, I can take care of everybody else and look outward and be in service to someone. But without medication, I feel that I would just sputter away into a sea of nothingness.

have always thought that the ocean mirrors the subconscious mind. There’s beauty—coral reefs, brightly colored fish, spume, and refracted sunlight—but there’s something darker, sharks and tiger fish and endless deeps just ready to swallow rickety fishing boats.