Quotes from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“In his suicide note, Kurt Cobain wrote, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." He was quoting a Neil Young song about Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. When I was twenty-four, I interviewed John Lennon. I asked him about this sentiment, one that pervades rock and roll. He took strong, outraged exception to it. "It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out, " he said. "I worship people who survive. I'll take the living and the healthy.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie to you. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“A world of contradictions, wherein everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“I'm not sure if I know any 'functional' families, if functional means a family without difficult times and members who don't have a full range of problems.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“I am becoming used to an overwhelming, grinding mixture of anger and worry...”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“We deny the severity of our loved one's problem not because we are naive, but because we can't know.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“How can both Nics, the loving and considerate and generous one, and the self-obsessed and self-destructive one, be the same person?”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Why does it help to read others' stories? It is not only that misery loves company, because (I learned) misery is too self-absorbed to want much company. Others' experiences did help with my emotional struggle...”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Here's a note to the parents of addicted children: Choose your music carefully...There are millions of treacherous moments.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Through Nic's drug addiction, I have learned that parents can bear almost anything....I shock myself with my ability to rationalize and tolerate things once unthinkable. The rationalizations escalate....It's only marijuana. He gets high only on weekends. At least he's not using hard drugs....”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“When I transformed my random and raw words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters, a semblance of order and sanity appeared where there had been only chaos and insanity.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“But here’s the rub of addiction. By its nature, people afflicted are unable to do what, from the outside, appears to be a simple solution—don’t drink. Don’t use drugs. In exchange for that one small sacrifice, you will be given a gift that other terminally ill people would give anything for: life.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“I tried everything I could to prevent my son’s fall into meth addiction. It would have been no easier to have seen him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a meth addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality. In an interview, Stephan Jenkins, the singer in Third Eye Blind, said that meth makes you feel “bright and shiny.” It also makes you paranoid, delusional, destructive, and self-destructive. Then you will do unconscionable things in order to feel bright and shiny again.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“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.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“I know there is no point in haranguing him because he will just shut down, but I want to cover every angle.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“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.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“That's when it struck me that I can't take my life as long as I can still laugh.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“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.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“This is the way that misery does love company: People are relieved to learn that they are not alone in their suffering, that they are part of something larger, in this case, a societal plague [drugs]--an epidemic of children, an epidemic of families.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“It's an incontrovertible fact that many--more than half of all children--will try [drugs]. For some of those, drugs will have no major negative impact on their lives. For others, however, the outcome will be catastrophic.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Only girls wear tights. - Nic responds, "Uh,uh. Superman wears tights.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Even as all the experts kindly tell the parents of addicts, 'You didn't cause it,' I have not let myself off the hook. I often feel as if I completely failed my son. In admitting this, I am not looking for sympathy or absolution, but instead stating a truth that will be recognized by most parents who have been through this.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“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”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Nic ha fatto uso di droghe, a fasi alterne, per oltre un decennio, e in quegli anni credo di avere sentito, pensato e fatto quasi tutto quello che un genitore può sentire, pensare e fare.”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“At my worst, I even resented Nic because an addict, at least when high, has a momentary respite from his suffering. There is no similar relief for parents or children or husbands or wives or others who love them.   Nic”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

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