How to Stop Time Quotes

“Addiction is a bargain with the cosmos: only stay time, and I'll remain in this holding pattern, too. The uncrossable gap between now and the past is given tangible form and conquered, daily, in the real but bridgeable gap between what I need and what I can get. Addiction creates a god so that time will stop--why all gods are created. God might be another story.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“Heroin is a stand-in, a stop-gap, a mask, for what we believe is missing. Like the "objects" seen by Plato's man in a cave, dope is the shadow cast by cultural movements we can't see directly.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“Never has nostalgia held stronger sway; never has the belief in the redemptive possibilities of the future seemed so laughable.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“Addiction can show us what is deeply suspect about nostalgia. That drive to return to the past isn’t an innocent one. It’s about stopping your passage to the future, it’s a symptom of fear of death, and the love of predictable experience. And the love of predictable experience, not the drug itself, is the major damage done to heroin users. Not getting on with your life is much more likely than going to the emergency room, and much harder to discern from the inside.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“La ley de rendimientos decrecientes describe actividades económicas en las que cuanto más realices una operación, menos beneficios obtienes. […] La adicción es un caso especial de rendimiento decreciente en el que cuanto menos beneficios te da una cosa, más te dedicas a ella. Se supone que si eres consciente de encontrarte en una situación de rendimiento decreciente, intentarás salir de ella; eso sería lo racional. La adicción se presenta cuando eres consciente de que obtienes menos beneficios de la droga, pero te resulta más difícil, en lugar de más fácil, cambiar tu situación. Lo que ocurre es que cuanto menor es la recompensa que te proporciona la droga, más atractivo te parece el pasado. Te das cuenta de que el futuro va a ser peor que el presente y mucho peor que el pasado.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“I love disaster/And I love what comes after.” So the life you lead after the disaster is free of certain kinds of anxiety, fears that are worse for you than worrying about being a drug user.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“babble There is this moment of exultation just when the dope hits your bloodstream, and you feel so good you have to share it, so you talk, you talk as you have never talked before (if you are normally reticent), you chat with people you’d cross the street to avoid other times, you speak almost as a substitute for motion. And in a group of people who have gotten high together, the talk erupts at nearly the same instant, all voices suddenly raised, engaged in discourse, if not dialogue, because what with everyone speaking at once, it is really impossible to have a conversation, but the delightful part is that no one is mad about being unable to complete sentences without interruption, because the bliss of heroin has descended on all.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“Heroin provides the all-absorbing, anxiety-deflecting presentness, which we can also find in sports. In the middle of a good tennis or basketball game, the voices in my head that do not bear on the activity of the moment are stilled. I forget about not forgetting to buy garbage bags, about my date tomorrow, about my eventual death. And I emerge from the spell of the sport better able to focus on what is and isn’t important.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“Perhaps if you fall out of the habit of playing a sport seriously, where those moments of immersion occur often, you are more vulnerable to a chemical substitute than someone who never knew those moments at all.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“When they stopped doing sports for one reason or another— injuries, moving to New York from a less urban environment, depression, work—they used dope to blow off their naturally high level of energy, to calm them down, make them feel normal.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“Rules are the enemy of entropy. The sonata and the sonnet, the haiku and the lipogram, the blues lyric and Scrabble, the civil statute and the religious injunction all set up artificial forms that comfort distress at the uncertainty of human fate”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“Our early training in the alphabet is mainly about submitting for the first time to an arbitrary discipline. The implacable order of letters will not be rearranged to please the child; no cute pleas or frightening howls will change it. Memorizing the order of the letters is an induction into the child’s inherited culture, a set of rules that initially appear equally arbitrary, but which make human society possible.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“There are not a lot of surprises, which is often the point; your rhythms are defined by the familiar and predictable arc of the drug’s breakdown in your body, rather than the hazards of time. It is absence of pain that you are looking for, but absence of living that you get.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“If I had to offer up a one sentence definition of addiction, I’d call it a form of mourning for the irrecoverable glories of the first time. This means that addiction is essentially nostalgic, which ought to tarnish the luster of nostalgia as much as that of addiction.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“Both of them had been to graduate school and studied science and knew, for instance, that golf provided little exercise, that many expensive cars were poorly engineered, that buying on credit was cost-ineffective, and that alcohol injured your health, made you say stupid things and increased your chances of injuring yourself in freak accidents.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“Heroin offers safety, and the illusion of immortality, but it robs you of the possibilities that make holding onto life worthwhile in the first place. And since death will take us all, addicts and never-addicts and former addicts and future addicts, writing about heroin suggests that while we are here, we ought to live, which means, alas, that we allow ourselves to age and to die.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z