Quotes from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“It's like if the music is loud enough I won't be able to listen to my own thoughts. ”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“And though I have done many shameful things, I am not ashamed of who I am. I am not ashamed of who I am because I know who I am. I have tried to rip myself open and expose everything inside - accepting my weaknesses and strengths - not trying to be anyone else. 'Cause that never works, does it?

So my challenge is to be authentic. An I believe I am today. I believe I am.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“I always get so overwhelmed trying to do everything perfectly. I can't do a job and not put everything I have into it. I need to be the best employee, the best co-worker, the best whatever. I need everyone to like me and I just burn out bending over backward to make that happen. Having people be mad at me is my worst fear. I can't stand it. There is this crazy fear I have of being rejected by anyone - even people I don't really care about. It's always better to leave them first, cut all ties, and disappear. They can't hurt me that way - no one can. ”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“Isn't that the greatest gift in the world-just not to care? ”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“they say suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. the problem with being human isn't really so temporary.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“I feel so completely crazy sometimes. I don't know which way I'm facing. All I can do is just shove all this shit to the side and try to move forward. ”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“None of them seem as crazy obsessive about everything as I am. It's strange 'cause I had the same feeling in high school that I have here. It's like, well, it just seems so easy for everyone else and so difficult for me. I turn from these extremes of feeling on top of the fucking world - to feeling so despondent. They don't have to struggle like I do - or maybe that's just me comparing my goddamn insides to everyone else's outsides. But I swear to God, I just seem to wrestle with everything more than anyone else.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“I feel just, you know, defeated. ”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“There's something about outward appearances that has always been important to me. I always thought I was so ugly. I mean, I really did. I remember being in L.A. at my mom's house as a little kid and just staring into the mirror for hours. It was like, if I looked long enough, maybe I'd finally be handsome. It never worked. I just got uglier and uglier. Nothing about me ever seemed good enough. And there was this sadness inside me - this hopelessness. Focusing on my physical appearance was at least easier than trying to address the internal shit.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“ Honestly, I'm not sure how much longer I can keep doing this. It's like there are seven candles lit in my stomach. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven candles burning and smoking - lit - seven flames of doubt, fear, sorrow, pain, waste, hopelessness, despair. They turn my insides black with soot and ash. There is something at the back of my eyes- a pressure building, building, building - hot like the flames of seven candles, which no amount of breath can extinguish.
I imagine drinking glasses of water. One, two, three four, five, six, seven. I dive into the clearest pool. I drown myself in the coarse, dry sand. I swallow handfuls of crushed white salt, but the flames burn still - brighter, hotter, deeper. Sweat runs in delicate patterns down my back, over my crooked spine and jutting hips. I scratch at the wounds these last weeks have left, but I can't break free of them. The flies gather and vultures circle overhead. The fire eats away my flesh. The fire spreads. The fire runs through my veins. The fire courses beneath my muscles - my tendons - the marrow of my bones.
I sit rocking on the street corner. No, I can't keep doing this. I just can't.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“We only have this one moment: NOW.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“And that feeling is there, inside me - being small, with all the confusion and worry and longing - but also the peace and safety. And now I'm here, giving that feeling to Lucy. She is an angel - light and sweet and delicate and lovely. That is so there in her. But it's also in Spencer, in my dad lying with me as a child on the futon, It's even in me. Sure, I buried it. I buried and buried it and turned away from everything light and sweet and delicate and lovely and became so scared and scarred and burdened and fucked up. But that goodness is still there, inside - it must be.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“I don't want you to worry about protecting my feelings or your father's or anybody's. When you were little you always tried to make everyone ahppy. Then it was like one day you just exploded.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“The dark is settling in. The sky glows yellow- pale- anemic from the city lights. The Tenderloin at night is a real horror show. Every 3 feet someone is accosting you with a plea for a handout or the offer of drug or sex. The men and women wander the streets and alleys with a threatening, violont want. Takers looking to take, hustlers looking to hustle, all trying to satisfy a craving that is parpatually unsatisfiable. And tonight I'm one of them.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“They say suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. he problem with being humas isn't really so temporary”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“The thing is, though, every time I think I’m just gonna give up—that I can’t possibly do it, that I’m just going to curl up alone somewhere and waste away, well, I always keep trying. I mean, for some reason I manage to make it through another day and then another day after that.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“I need everyone to like me and I just burn out bending over backward to make that happen. Having people be mad at me is my worst fear. I can't stand it. There is this crazy fear I have of being rejected by anyone - even people I don't really care about. It's always better to leave them first, cut all ties, and disappear. They can't hurt me that way - no one can.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“In a way it's like too serene or whatever - too empty. I feel that familiar feeling of being a dark smudge on this otherwise pristine white canvas. There's just no way to blend in out here.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“Now is now. There is nothing but now... This, right here, is all there is.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“But, when I was growing up, the one thing that did help me not to feel so isolated and crazy was reading - especially books by authors who fearlessly examined and exposed their highly imperfect inner lives. Books like "Confessions of a Mask" by Yukio Mishima; "Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller; "Try" by Dennis Cooper; and, of course, the works of authors like Bukowski, Salinger, Hesse, Bataille, Iceberg Slim, and Murakami. These writers revealed the things that existed beneath most humans' seemingly secure and confident exteriors. I suddenly realized, after reading their work, that I wasn't unique - that my doubts and fears and insecurities were more universal that I could've ever imagined. Their words gave me strength. They have me permission to start trying to accept my flaws, my darkness, my insanity. They let me know that it was okay not to fit in with everyone else - to be a sensitive person - and that others struggled just like I did. It was such a relief when I finally began to understand this. It was like I could breathe - maybe for the first time.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“There's something about outward appearances that has always been important to me. I always thought I was so ugly. I mean, I really did. I remember... as a little kid and just staring into the mirror for hours. It was like, if I looked long enough, maybe I'd finally be handsome. It never worked. I just got uglier and uglier. Nothing about me ever seemed good enough. And there was this sadness inside me - this hopelessness. Focusing on my physical appearance was at least easier than trying to address the internal shit. I could control the external - at least, to a point. I could buy different clothes, or cut my hair, or whatever. The pit opening up inside me was too frightening to even look at.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“There is this crazy fear I have of being rejected by anyone - even people I don't really care about. It's always better to leave them first, cut all ties, and disappear. They can't hurt me that way - no one can.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“So you think you should just be able to kill yourself and no one should care?... You don't think that your actions are gonna affect other people - the people who love you?”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“It's like that story of the father whose son breaks his leg. The villagers come up and say, 'Your son broke his leg, what bad luck.' but the father replies, 'Good luck, bad luck, who knows?' Then there's a war and all the young men in the village must fight. There is a terrible battle and most everyone is killed - except for the man's son who couldn't fight because he broke his leg. So the villagers come up to him and say, 'What good luck, your son didn't have to fight and now he is alive.' But the father replies, 'Good luck, bad luck, who knows?”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“Sure, I buried it. I buried it and buried it and turned away from everything light and sweet and delicate and lovely and became so scared and scarred and burdened and fucked up. But that goodness is there, inside - it must be.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“What can you say about hospitals? No matter how upscale they are, the air is always saturated with disinfectant and an underlying stench of chemicals. Most of the patients' doors are closed, but a few of them are open. The beds are mostly occupied by elderly men and women with brown splotchy age marks all over. They're hooked up to tubes and wires and things... They appear to be sleeping - or lost. It's hard for me to look at them. It's as though all the emptiness inside of all of us - regret about our past and fear about our future - has been physically manifested in these withering bodies.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“And I have this, for now. I just wish I could figure out how to keep my fucking mind from going all over the place - dwelling on all the loss and pain and everything I'VE DONE - then jumping off into the future to how impossible it all seems.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“I guess I just struggle with belonging to any organization. I always feel like I should be able to do it on my own. My ego tells me I'm better than all this... I want to rebel against it, though of course, I don't really have any options.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“It's like the world's gravitational pull has just lessened tenfold. Everything trapped in me, rushing in and out like the ocean against a jetty - pounding over and over, trying to crush the breaker wall with each rhythmic explosion - has finally been taken away. I cry for that and I'm not sure what else.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“The only thing that ever really gives us any genuine satisfaction is caring for other people. It doesn't matter how popular we are or anything. The only thing that actually makes life more fulfilling is our love for others... And the results speak for themselves.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

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“I taught how to be sociable with ink on paper. I told my students that when they were writing they should be good dates on blind dates, should show strangers good times. Alternatively, they should run really nice whorehouses, come one, come all, although they were in fact working in perfect solitude. I said I expected them to do this with nothing but idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and maybe eight punctuation marks, because it wasn't anything that hadn't been done before.

In 1996, with movies and TV doing such good jobs of holding the attention of literates and illiterates alike, I have to question the value of my very strange, when you think about it, charm school. There is this: Attempted seductions with nothing but words on paper are so cheap for would-be ink-stained Don Juans or Cleopatras!They don't have to get a bankable actor or actress to commit to the project, and then a bankable director, and so on, and then raise millions and millions of buckareenies from manic-depressive experts on what most people want.
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― Max Frei, quote from The Stranger

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“Hello, Lucy. Do you name all your weapons, Grunthor?”

“O’ course. It’s tradition.”

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“His voice just shot through me. It’s amazing, the things your body will do just when you don’t want them to: heart speeding up, fingers aching. I’d always liked his voice, low and laid-back, the kind of voice that made you listen, a voice that still caused me to teeter when I heard it saying my old nickname.”
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