Sing Backwards and Weep Quotes

“Before Layne, I saw everything in strict black and white. He was every beautiful shade of color on the wheel, as well as many that had never been seen before.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“That was my life in a nutshell: a stolen moment of desperate pleasure, an assful of tiny daggers, then an eternity of agony.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“I was, in reality, driven by what I’d heard referred to in rehab all those years ago as “a thousand forms of fear.” Sadly, somewhere deep in my soul, I knew that was probably me.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“But it was the fear of showing my true heart, at times either so full it might burst or so empty I could cry, that hounded me most viciously. There had been a perpetual war between myself and the costume of persona I’d donned as a youngster and then worn my entire life. Petrified that someone might discover who I really was: merely a child inside the body of an adult.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“my eyes: my wasted childhood, my arrogant youth, my anger and obsessions, crime, delusions, self-loathing, paranoia, hopelessness, fury, and sad junkie downward spiral.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“I was, at the end of the day, a slow learner, an extremely slow learner afflicted with the lack of self-awareness to even realize it. I always thought I knew it all, but I was only ever motivated into action by one of two things: pleasure or pain.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“You sick SOB! You owe me a Bible, MF-er!” His angry, abbreviated expletives drew huge laughter from everyone on the bus. Turns out I had been rolling joints with pages torn from one of his personal Bibles. I’d not known where the book had come from and used it because it was all I could find.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“It hit me like a hammer. I realized that, even at this moment when I felt as happy and comfortable with myself as I could ever remember being, the guilt and shame I wore like a noose around my neck was still obvious to this sensitive, intuitive woman. She saw right through me.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“I became aware of a dull, cemetery-dead emptiness inside. I had stopped feeling anything at all. No rage, sadness, fear, nothing. I had finally crossed the line and ceased to give a damn about life, death, or any other meaningless thing in between.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“The grueling brutality of the past two weeks’ events, no, the dysfunction of my entire life, all of it had brought me to this moment of supreme lunacy, confusing self-laceration, and pain. I faced a tidal wave of dopesickness that was going to obliterate me.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“was running, raging, and drugging myself to death. A bitter, mountainous, unnamed, unrecognized, and poisonous grief melded with my rage. Rage pointed inward, and oftentimes fired wildly outward if I could find a semi-legitimate excuse to explode. Until then, I would silently kill anyone within range via silent, focused hatred. My mantra had become Die, motherfucker, die.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“I was compelled to ask a stranger to keep my secrets, but most addicts were keeping secrets from someone themselves.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“The lyrical narrative of the individual songs was rooted in my day-to-day experience: pain, loss, the inner world and trials of someone strung out and struggling. Without comfort or love, searching for what, who knew? But it was something if ever found, might be located on a spiritual plane, not in the physical world.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“My jealousy and bitter resentment over the painful, self-inflicted loss of my former love brought out a negative, sometimes violent reaction. My loss of Anna was still very much a raw, open wound.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“heroin erased the myriad collection of endless worries that had kept me awake all night most of my life. It had freed me from feeling anything: loss, heartbreak, regret, grief, resentment, as well as the burning hatred and disgust I felt not only for myself but also for other people I thought had wronged me, real or imagined. When dope enveloped me in its golden glow, all that melted away like springtime snow. The world became black and white, boiled down to just getting enough drugs each day to keep the dogs of withdrawals off my heels. I felt as though heroin had saved me from a life of misery, and I was prepared to go to any lengths to make sure I would always have it. Heroin was my number one, and anything else—everything else—was such a far-distant second place as to be virtually unseen on the radar screen of my life’s importance.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“The word depression had never crossed my mind, never in relation to what I’d been going through, and, in fact, never at all in my entire life. It was not something in my limited categories of feelings, nor was it a characterization I’d have ascribed to myself. “I’m only depressed because no one can tell me what’s wrong with me.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“I was only ever motivated into action by one of two things: pleasure or pain.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“...fuck stopping. I was going to get loaded immediately. The entire demented merry-go-round began to spin once more”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“In the spring of the next year came a third record, The Las Vegas Story, and this trio of albums, all of which I’d been exposed to in the span of just a few months, became my bible. Living in Ellensburg, it was tough to get information about any underground band, much less one like the Gun Club.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“When LA band L7 were being hit with mud balls, I watched from sidestage as badass singer Donita Sparks pulled out her tampon onstage and threw it at the audience, one of the best responses to rowdy crowd behavior I’d ever seen.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“a man standing behind me wearing a cowboy hat said under his breath, "Fucking faggot." I punched him in the face.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“My main issue had been leaving my comfort zone for an unknown place where I’d be forced to find a source of heroin when I could just stay home and be fine. I turned down many opportunities in those days for the same reason.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“Whenever I was with Kurt and his wife Courtney Love, she’d have me find her vein and hit her, a task made more difficult by her nonstop talking, storytelling, or complaining.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir