One in Four Quotes

“That’s the thing about trauma. You never get to go back to who you were before it happened.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“I meant everything I said to her earlier. She didn’t get to come at me like she was the great purveyor of social justice when she’d just literally killed a person herself. Her actions, whatever part she’d played, had destroyed an entire family. How was she any different than I was?”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“I don’t care how drunk I was. If I’d drank all the alcohol in the liquor cabinet and shot heroin afterward—I couldn’t tell another person to take their own life.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“Much like other addicts, I was someone I didn’t recognize when I was using. It was one of the reasons I’d gone to school to study addiction, because I wanted to understand how rational, decent people could do such abhorrent things while they were under the influence. Also, why I’d spent so much of my adult life helping other people get sober.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“Had she meant to kill Maddie or just to ruin my career? It was the most important question. Because if she meant to kill Maddie, that changed everything about this.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“Addicts stop when they’re ready and not a moment sooner. It doesn’t matter how much you love them. Or equally hate them. Punish them. Reward them. Yell at them. Coddle them. There’s nothing you can do to keep an addicted person from using. It’s why I didn’t try. And sometimes they don’t stop. Ever. Sometimes they die.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“Trying to have the saddest story so they could tug at the world’s heartstrings the hardest. Get people really invested in their characters because everyone knows you have to be emotionally invested in a character in order to care about what happened to them.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“leaning forward and at the same time eyeing the bottle of wine that still had some red left in it. That desire never went away. As seductive as any other forbidden lover.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean anything. He’s a drug addict whose first impulse is to avoid and run away. He quite literally ran away from a very emotional situation.” “Or he had something to do with it.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“Those luxury rehabilitation places that are like spas. Ones that cost fifty thousand dollars to attend. But none of those fancy centers kept them sober after they’d been discharged or made a lasting difference in their lives. Most of them were high within three days. And do you know why?”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“The classic stall to give yourself more time to think, since I hadn’t expected his question.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“You didn’t feel like you were exploiting them when they were at their weakest?” “Us exploiting them?” I pointed to my chest like there was no way she could be referring to me. “They were the ones monetizing the situation. They had the most to gain from the experience. Not me. They were probably paid more than all of us.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“It doesn’t matter how badly you might want to or how hard you try. That person is gone. Along with that life. It’s a marker that forever changes you. And if it doesn’t? Well, then it wasn’t real trauma. Because real trauma? You’re altered forever. Anything else is just a hard time.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“But even if she became a different person, somehow beautiful again, she still lived in a world that was so ugly. Hideous. Social media had inflicted humanity with a terrible virus that turned people’s brains into mush and made them vile creatures. It was only going to get worse. Not better. That’s when she knew it didn’t matter. That even if she left and went far, far away, she still lived with these people and in a world that hurt her heart too much to exist in”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“How many people are walking around in the world with their lights turned off? The switch inside them faded to black? People just like her. Still wearing huge smiles on their faces. Filling rooms with their infectious laughs and bubbly personalities. Still pretty. Still sparkling. Still saying all the same lines. But gone.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“She wanted to feel again. To come back inside the body. Her empty-balloon body. Filled with no air. She wanted to be back inside. Alive.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“Life with addicts and alcoholics is heartbreaking. It never gets easier to watch people destroy themselves. Or the way they take down everyone close to them in the process.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“She just wanted to feel something again. That’s what happens when you disassociate from your body. You’re cut off—not just from the bad and the pain. All the emotions, and she missed them like they were actual people.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“through. “You’ve got to just let it go. You can’t live in the past. Eventually, if you want to have any kind of meaningful life, you have to forgive yourself and move forward. There’s nothing else you can do. You’ll torture yourself forever and live in agony if you never stop trying to figure out what happened in that other life,”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“That’s the thing about trauma. You never get to go back to who you were before it happened. It doesn’t matter how badly you might want to or how hard you try. That person is gone. Along with that life. It’s a marker that forever changes you. And if it doesn’t? Well, then it wasn’t real trauma. Because real trauma? You’re altered forever. Anything else is just a hard time. If”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“Social media had inflicted humanity with a terrible virus that turned people’s brains into mush and made them vile creatures. It was only going to get worse. Not better.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“Hurting other people made them feel good. That’s what this world was full of. People that preyed on others’ misery and enjoyed it.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“Javon used to talk about it in our sessions. How the bridge she ran by in the morning, swearing she was never drinking again and going to get sober, was the same bridge she had to talk herself out of jumping off every night when she was drunk. I’d never heard a more perfect description of addiction.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“You’ve got to just let it go. You can’t live in the past. Eventually, if you want to have any kind of meaningful life, you have to forgive yourself and move forward. There’s nothing else you can do. You’ll torture yourself forever and live in agony if you never stop trying to figure out what happened in that other life,” she’d said. More than once. So, eventually, I did.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“It’s why I understood the clients I worked with so well. I used to be one of them, and nobody knows how hard it is to get sober than someone who’s had to do it themselves. Or the trauma that’s there to meet you when you do. Becoming conscious is so painful.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“Because there’s pure evil in this world. I know that because I’ve seen it, and, well, everything in this world runs by the laws of science. If there’s pure evil, then there’s got to be pure good. That’s God.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“But she still believed in a just universe. That, in the end, good would ultimately prevail over evil. That we live in a system where doing the right thing gets rewarded. Where doing the right thing matters. But their responses shook her to the deepest part of her core. He violated her body, but they raped her soul.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“Truth was, hurting herself made her feel alive, if only for a split second.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“Angry white boys—especially the entitled ones—were the scariest mammals.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four

“Then quickly remembering you were never supposed to yell for help when you were in trouble, because people wouldn’t come. Yell fire. Always yell fire.”
― Lucinda Berry, One in Four