By Category: Drugs

“LSD melts your mind, not in your hand.”

-Anonymous

~

“And I'll be your girl, if you say it's a gift
And you give me some more of your drugs
Yeah, I'll be your pet, if you just tell me it's a gift
Cuz I'm tired of whys, choking on whys,
Just need a little because, because
I let the beast in and then;
I even tried forgiving him, but it's too soon
So I'll fight again, again, again, again, again.”

-Fast As You Can, Fiona Apple

~

“A junky runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junk time to start.”

-Junkie, William S. Burroughs

~

“I couldn't sleep until the next morning at dawn, and then I had a nightmare every time I dozed off. In one dream, I was coming down with rabies. I looked in the mirror and my face changed and I began howling. In another dream, I had a chlorophyll habit. Me and about five other chlorophyll addicts are waiting to score on the landing of a cheap Mexican hotel. We turn green and no one can kick a chlorophyll habit. One shot and you're hung for life. We are turning into plants.”

-Junkie, William S. Burroughs

~

“Junkies have no interest in sex and they have no interest in other people except as suppliers of junk. They go around looking younger for a few days. Then they need more.”

-Just One Fix, William S. Burroughs

~

“Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit--Kid, it was tasty...”

-Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

~

“I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction... I did absolutely nothing.”

-Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

~

“Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy...”

-Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

~

“The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to the product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”

-Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

~

“Downers and heroin make you itch.”

-Journals of Kurt Cobain, Kurt Cobain

Recommended by Laura.

~

“"I still get nightmares. In fact I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I'm not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares. For a while there I tried every pill imaginable. Anything to curb the fear. Excedrin PMs, Melatonin, L-tryptophan, Valium, Vicodin, quite a few members of the barbital family. A pretty extensive list, frequently mixed often matched, with shots of bourbon, a few lung rasping bong hits, sometimes even the vaporous confidence-trip of cocaine. None of it helped. I think it's pretty safe to assume there's no lab sophisticated enough yet to synthesize the kind of chemicals I need.”

-House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

~

“Malnutrition precipitates mania. So does speed. Both were at play here, in large doses. But so was masochism - the subjection of the self and/or body to pain and fear, ultimately resulting in a transitory sense of mastery over pain and fear. Every morning, I ran five miles, up and down this hall, touching the door at each end, the mark of an obsession. I had to touch the door or else it didn't count. You make up these rules, and if you break the rules, God help you, you have to run an extra mile to make up for it. When I was done, I'd go downstairs to the workout room and weigh myself.”

-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher

~

“And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past, you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears—that's what soma is.”

-Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

~

“And all the drugs in the world
Can't save us from ourselves.”

-There by the Grace of God, Manic Street Preachers

Recommended by James.

~

“Here, I'm supposed to tell her the truth. I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control of his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.

In a way, being an addict is very proactive.”

-Choke, Chuck Palahniuk

~

“She moved on to the acryllic department. Now came the fun part. Without regard to price, she began to pull jumbo jars of paint from the shelves. And, burping all the while, her esophagus smoldering like a soggy fuse, she chanted the names of the colors as she dropped them into her basket.

'Indian red,' she sang. 'Mars red, venetian red, cadmium red, vermilion, and rose madder.' There was alizarin crimson, magenta, and that thorn in the backside of the sinful, sister terra rosa.

There was cobalt blue, cerulean blue, pressian blue, ultramarine blue, and, with just a soupcon of garlic, french ultramarine blue.

'Hansa yellow.' She liked the sound of that one so well she sang it twice. 'Hansa yello' (patron saint of jaundiced piano players). then, 'zinc yellow, lemon yellow, yellow ocher, mars yellow, naples yellow, and brilliant orange.

'Thio violet, prism violet, mars violet, cobalt violet, dioxazine purple.'

Next, those nightmares of newlywed homemakers, raw sienna and burnt sienna. ('He likes his medium rare, boo-hoo.') Raw umber and burnt umber ('There, there, dear, we'll send out for pizza.'), van-dyke brown, brown madder, thalo copper, silver, gold oxide, and payne's gray.

'Viridian, o viridian! Freen earth, cadmium green, hooker's green' (protectress of novice prostitutes) 'and sap green' (patron saint of voters who believe all Irish-American politicians are honest).

'O sing, mars black, lamp black, ivory black, and titanium white' (blessed are the Caucasians who went down with the ship). 'Sing iridescent white and light portrait pink.'

What did she forget? Lily white, basic black, snow white, black beauty, white christmas, black friday, white supremacy, black power, the color purple, people-eater purple, the color of money, long green, lawn green, lorne green, Lohengrin, the color of your parachute, the color of my true love's hair, puce, mars puce, mars chartreuse, mars bars, little-boy blue, blue bayou, blues in the night, paint-the-town red, do-it-up brown, james brown, dorian gray, red skelton, red october, tom clancy red, better-dead-than red, better-ill-than teal, greenberg, goldberg, long-john silver, mellow yellow, electrical banana, yellow peril, yellow fever, mayonnaise yellow, mustard, relish, and onions.

Ellen Cherry's head was spinning. She felt dizzy and faint. She should have known better than to mix rum and art supplies. ”

-Skinny Legs And All, Tom Robbins

~

“There's no such thing as an ex-junkie.”

-Henry Rollins

~

“This afternoon's task was to introduce us to the works of William Shakespeare, and once again I was completely captivated by his charm and skill. [..] I loved the undercurrent of hostility that lay beneath the surface of this deceptively beautiful language. It seemed a shame that people no longer spoke this way, and I undertook a campaign to reintroduce Elizabethan English to the citizens of North Carolina.

'Perchance, fair lady, thou dost think me unduly vexed by the sorrowful state of thine quarters,' I said to my mother as I ran the vacuum cleaner over the living-room carpet she was inherently too lazy to bother with. 'These foul specks, the evidence of life itself, have sullied not only thine shag-tempered mat but also thine character. Be ye mad, woman? Were it a punishable crime to neglect thine dwellings, you, my feeble-spirited mistress, would hang from the tallest tree in penitence for your shameful ways. Be there not garments to launder and iron free of turbulence? See ye not the porcelain plates and hearty mugs waiting to be washed clean of evidence? Get thee to thine work, damnable lady, and quickly, before the products of thine very loins raise their collected fists in a spirit born both of rag and indignation, forcibly coaxing the last breath from the foul chamber of thine vain and upright throat. Go now, wastrel, and get to it!'

My mother reacted as if I had whipped her with a short length of yarn. The intent was there, but the weapon was strange and inadequate. I could tell by the state of my room that she spent the next day searching my dresser for drugs.”

-Naked, David Sedaris

~

“She tried to keep her head up, but it continually fell forward and she struggled to get it erect, but the energy was not there and it would hang like a gourd for a few moments, then fall back on her chest, each movement a monumental effort, each failure a death knell. With each breath the tears seemed to build up within her and she could feel and hear them swishing around, feeling them threaten to drown her as her lungs seem to hang limp in her chest. She wanted to cry out, at least to herself, but she forgot that there was someone, something to call out to. There seemed to be a vague sense of recollection in the back of her mind and when she tried to dig it out she once again fell exhausted, and if she hadn't, the drugs and shock treatment would not have allowed her to recognize the word God.”

-Requiem For A Dream, Hubert Selby Jr.

~

“The pills are a mother, but better,
every color and as good as sour balls.
I'm on a diet from death.”

-The Addict, Anne Sexton

~

“It wasn't a suicide attempt, it was an escape from everything awful. When we cut, we're in control - we make our own pain, ans we can stop it whenever we want. Physical pain relieves mental anguish. For a brief moment, the pain of the cutting is the only thing in the cutter's mind, and when that stops and the other comes back, it's weaker. Drugs do that that too, and sex, but not like cutting. Nothing is like cutting.”

-Crosses, Shelley Stoehr

Recommended by Melissa.

~

“A doctor wrote her some XANAX; the drug seemed to make her dreams even more spectacular and emotionally unfamiliar, as though they were drawn from the stuff of someone else's life. Sleeping and waking, the notion of being lost, of having wandered out of the right life, kept turning up in different guises. She imagined mirrors in which she could not find herself.”

-Outerbridge Reach, Robert Stone

~

“Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.But nobody can handle that other trip - the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus - Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.”

-Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

~

“Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that?”

-Transpotting [movie]

~

“Nor did I. Our only response was to keep on going and fuck everything. Pile misery upon misery, heap it up on a spoon and dissolve it with a drop of bile, then squirt it into a stinking purulent vein and do it all over again. Keep on going: getting up, going out, robbing, stealing, fucking people over, propelling ourselves with longing towards the day it would all go wrong.

Because no matter how much you stash or how much you steal, you never have enough. No matter how often you go out and rob and fuck people over you always need to get up and do it all again.”

-Transpotting [movie]

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