130 Quotes by David Sheff

The hopeful part about that is when you do have that help, you will feel better. It still doesn’t make this easy. Nothing makes this easy, but you can make better decisions.

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.

Some people may opt out. Their child turns out to be whatever it is that they find impossible to face – for some, the wrong religion; for some, the wrong sexuality; for some, a drug addict. They close the door. Click. Like in mafia movies: “I have no son. He is dead to me.” I have a son and he will never be dead to me.

There is much good, but to enjoy the beauty, the love, one must bear the painful.

Every time the telephone rings, my stomach constricts. Long after the euphoria from meth is no longer attainable – Tennessee Williams described the equivalent with alcohol in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: “I never again could get the click” – addicts are agitated and confused, and most stop eating and sleeping. Parents of addicts don’t sleep, either.

Caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.

Ha Jin writes: ‘Some great men and women are fortified and redeemed through their suffering, and they even seek sadness instead of happiness, just as Van Gogh asserted, ‘Sorrow is better than joy,’ and Balzac declared, ‘Suffering is one’s teacher.’ But these dicta are suitable only for extraordinary souls, for the select few. For ordinary people like us, too much suffering can only make us meaner, crazier, pettier, and more wretched.

When Sigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, Luigi, and Zelda, heard the complaints about video games, he simply shrugged his shoulders. “Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock ’n’ roll.

The kanji characters he chose to make up the name of his new company – nin-ten-do – could be understood as “Leave luck to heaven,” or “Deep in the mind we have to do whatever we have to do.