Heather > Heather's Quotes

“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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“But you know, I don’t think I will be so scared to die. I think it’s like today: the end of a vacation when you are ready to go home.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy

“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, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“Al-Anon’s Three Cs: “You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, you can’t cure it.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy

“A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after - oh, that's love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She's the one you can't put down.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant's afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it's been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“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, Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“The death of a parent, he wrote, “despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I hope you never hear those words. Your mom. She died. They are different than other words. They are too big to fit in your ears. They belong to some strange, heavy, powerful language that pounds away at the side of your head, a wrecking ball coming at you again and again, until finally, the words crack a hole large enough to fit inside your brain. And in so doing, they split you apart. ”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

“You count the hours you could have spent with your mother, it's a lifetime in itself.”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

“A child embarrassed by his mother,” she said, “is just a child who hasn’t lived long enough.”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

“She wasn't easy on me, don't get me wrong. She smacked me. She scolded me. She punished me. But she loved me. She really did. She loved me falling off a swing set. She loved me stepping on her floors with muddy shoes. She loved me through vomit and snot and bloody knees. She loved me coming and going, at my worst and at my best. She had a bottomless well of love for me.”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

“Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won't they, Rose? You want to ask,'Whose child is this?'"

Rose chuckled.

"But usually, they're just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out.”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

“I don't know what it is about the food your mother makes for you, especially when it's something that anyone can make - pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad - but it carries a certain taste of memory.”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

“Not only had my brother disappeared, but--and bear with me here--a part of my very being had gone with him. Stories about us could, from them on, be told from only one perspective. Memories could be told but not shared.”
― John Corey Whaley, Where Things Come Back

“I wish I’d paid better attention. I didn’t yet think of time as finite. I didn’t fully appreciate the stories she told me until I became adult, and by then I had to make do with snippets pasted together, a film projected on the back of my mind.”
― Jessica Maria Tuccelli, Glow

“I felt that I did not really remember her except through the pain, and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven yet deeper.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“Grandmothers are everything in life:
1. If you need a friend, grandma is willing to be your best friend ever.
2. If you need a shoulder to cry on, grandma is there to listen.
3. If you need an encouragement, grandma is there to give you one.
4. If you need an advice, grandma is there to give you the best advice.
5. If you need a prayer partner, grandma is there to pray with you.
6. If you need someone to understand your situation, grandma is there to show support.
The list goes on!!!!”
― Euginia Herlihy

“And like that, I said goodbye to my grandmother like we were two people who met in a coffee shop, shared a lifetime of stories and left wanting more, but knowing we’d meet there again.”
― Darnell Lamont Walker