Rat Park Quotes

“The thought of having something of substance to ruin was almost more terrifying than the loneliness of not having anything in the first place.”
― Marina Vivancos, Rat Park

“But, for Dominic and the addicts around him, it was more than that. Their thoughts were diseased. They were like a buzzing infection under the skin, an alarm clock that kept blaring and blaring and would drive you insane if it wasn’t turned off. That was what the high gave Dominic. An escape from the cruel anxiety of being. He didn’t know how he could tolerate living his whole life aware and present. To have to make decisions and live with them. How did people live with that pain without becoming so exhausted they wanted to just give up?”
― Marina Vivancos, Rat Park

“When he’d been younger, he’d thought he’d feel good when good things happened and bad when bad things did, but life turned out to be so much more complicated than that. Sometimes the worst moments in his life had filled him with a numbness that was nothing, and the best times carried with them a fear that had him shaking inside his skin.”
― Marina Vivancos, Rat Park

“It was exhausting to have. To try, to be, to worry about everything he held and what he would eventually do to lose it all. It was easier, at that moment, to just give in. To let himself be taken away and forget, to finally scratch the itch under his skin and feel warm and good for once.”
― Marina Vivancos, Rat Park

“Suddenly, as Dominic sat on that foreign planet, watching Flor laugh and his parents smile with him, warm food on the table and their biggest problem a history exam, Dominic wanted to escape. He didn’t want to be privy to this world. He didn’t want to know about what he had never had. He wanted to float away and forget the image of the happy family in front of him.”
― Marina Vivancos, Rat Park