Clean Quotes

“What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We're just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive?”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Imagine trying to live without air.
Now imagine something worse.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“I wonder if anybody else feels this way, if anyone in here is as scared as I am. Are they as sad and angry and confused and ashamed? Is that even possible? Is it even possible for one building to hold all that pain?”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Do you remember? Do you remember being solid? Do you remember life before the hole? Before you were empty and needed to be filled? There was a time when everything was enough. There was a time you didn't try to get out of your own skin. Remember?”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Nothing made me the way I am. Nothing but me.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Before there was Cocaine or vodka or sex or any of that, there was fantasy. There was escape. That was my first addiction. I remember being a little kid and imagining everything different, myself different. How did I get the idea in my head at age eight that everything was better somewhere else? Why would a child have a hole inside that can't get full no matter what she does? The real world could never make me happy, so I retreated to the world inside my head. And as I grew, as the real world proved itself more and more painful, the fantasy world expanded.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Do you remember? Do you remember the world before the poison?”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Shirley: "Christopher, would you like to tell Olivia what "F.I.N.E" means?"

Christopher: "Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional"
...

Olivia: "But what if you really do feel fine?"

Shirley: "Christopher, care to answer that?"

Christopher: "Um, there's no such feeling as fine.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Imagine everything feeling wrong. Imagine a hole in your chest the size of God.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“This is the kind of thing that makes sense to them; this is a language they know. They know what to do with`disease'. They know how to attach a doctor's medical descriptions to hope.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“The thing is, you don't get many choices when you're stuck in a secret. The world gets so small, you learn to be grateful for whatever you can get.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“The thing is, I like rules. They make me feel safe. The predictability of my boring life makes everything make sense. I guess that makes me a freak but I'm okay with that. You get to a certain point and you just realize there's no use in trying to pretend you're normal.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“She had no idea there were so many different kinds of lonely. But she does not want your pity. She just wants you to understand what can happen when you’re a million kinds of lonely at once, when you find yourself among identical strangers you do not want to get to know.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional. (FINE)”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“I don't know what any of this means. All I know is I feel crazy, like I want to cry and laugh and scream at the same time.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“How is feeling like a failure supposed to help me? The way I see it, they should invent some pill that just makes you forget whatever you want, some pill that makes you numb and functional.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Everybody has fucked-up families, even normal kids, even the ones who aren’t in here. There’s no magic math equation that makes us addicts, nothing that separates us from everyone else.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Do you remember? Do you remember the world before the dark? Do you remember the world with mothers and fathers and stillness that did not feel like death?”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“What are you supposed to do when you forget what normal feels like?”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Total silence would be better. Total silence I could get used to.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“And now they’re telling me I have to get rid of the only thing that loosens its grip. That’s the irony, isn’t it? [...] The thing that helped has become the thing that imprisons us. We keep feeding it and it keeps wanting more. This is a disease that tries to convince you that you don’t have it. This is a disease where the medicine that gives relief is the same thing that kills you.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“This thing that’s always been inside and hidden deep is getting bigger and stronger and threatening to show itself, and I want to stop it but I also don’t, and I don’t know if I’m ready, but I think maybe I want what’s inside turned outside, maybe I want everything out in the open, all my secrets laid out for everyone to see. I wonder what that would look like. I wonder what kind of mess it would make. I wonder if you can ever really be ready for the part of you that you’ve been hiding your whole life to finally come out.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“I’ve spent my life comparing myself to everyone around me. I’ve made it an art form. I’ve developed detailed systems to calculate where I stand, based on GPA, body mass index, fashion, popularity, family income, etc. Based on this criteria, I have always fared somewhere in the safe middle.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Getting rid of the drugs doesn’t get rid of all the other ways you learned to deal with the world. It’s not that easy.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“You get to a certain point and you just realize there's no use in trying to pretend your normal.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“I’m feeling really hopeful about it, like maybe I actually have a chance to get better. To be happy. It’s funny, I just realized that my whole life, the whole time I’ve been trying to be perfect, I never once considered happiness as part of the equation. I guess it seemed so impossible I couldn’t even let myself fantasize about it. But now, I don’t know, things feel different somehow. Like impossible things might not be so impossible.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“I don’t feel great, but I also don’t feel terrible, either, and I guess that’s how normal people feel most of the time. They live in the space between black and white, and their ups and downs are various shades of gray, not the extreme highs and lows I’ve always thought of as normal. I think that’s one of the major differences between us and them, between addicts and Normies. Somewhere along the line we got stuck on this roller coaster that only knows how to go to the highest up and the lowest low. We get high so we can feel invincible and perfect, but the feeling never lasts. Gravity always wins, and we fall fast, to a place lower and darker than many people will probably ever know. And the crazy thing is that this is just normal for us. We cycle through these extremes all the time, and it’s become as natural as breathing. Exhausting, but natural.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“How can she stand up there so tall as she’s telling us how her mother beat her and her father molested her when she was a little girl? How is it possible for her to look so proud? How is she not being consumed by shame? She should be disintegrating before our eyes. She should be struck by lightning, and God’s big, angry, booming voice should be shaking the room with “How dare you? I told you never to tell.” But that’s not her God, she says. Her God is loving and kind and wants what’s best for her. Her God loves peace and serenity and forgiveness. Her God doesn’t make her keep secrets. I thought I knew God all my life, but maybe it was some other guy the whole time. I want this God. I want Val’s God. I want a God who doesn’t make me jump through hoops and hate myself to earn his love.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“I think before I ever became an alcoholic, before I even tasted alcohol or tried drugs, I was already programmed to be this way. Before there was cocaine or vodka or sex or any of that, there was fantasy. There was escape. That was my first addiction. I remember being a little kid and imagining everything different, myself different. How did I get the idea in my head at age eight that everything was better somewhere else? Why would a child have a hole inside that can’t get full no matter what she does? The real world could never make me happy, so I retreated to the world inside my head. And as I grew, as the real world proved itself more and more painful, the fantasy world expanded.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Everyone gets the message when they’re a kid that girls like pink and boys like blue, but she’s taken it to a whole new level, like being a girl is her religion and wearing pink is some kind of commandment.”
― Amy Reed, Clean