We compiled 46 brilliant quotes about heroin, and other opiates. We did so to expose the traps, tragedies and torments of opiate addiction.
Quotes about heroin addiction
1. They can take it out of your body but they can’t take it out of your brain.
– Charlie Parker (picture up top)
2. Monkeys can’t sell bananas.
– Seni Marquis
3. The habits that took years to build, do not take a day to change.
– Susan Powter
4. Every vice has it’s excuse ready.
– Publilius Syrus
5. Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.
– George Carlin
6. Heroin addiction is like driving a car with the steering going out. You eventually resign yourself to the inevitability of what’s going to happen.
– David Bowie
7. We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
– Albert Einstein
8. Some things are better than heroin, and some things are worse, but there is nothing quite like it.
– Anonymous
9. The hardest thing in life to learn is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
– David Russell
10. If it wasn’t for heroin I’d be addicted to Facebook.
– Anonymous
11. From the dark poppy a soporific is obtained by making incision in the stalk, when the buds are forming … it is not only a soporific, but if too large a dose be swallowed the sleep even ends in death.
– Pliny the Elder, 23-79 AD
12. We feel free when we escape, even if it be from the frying pan into the fire.
– Eric Hoffer
13. It is not that some people have willpower and some do not. It is that some people are ready to change and others are not.
– John Gordan
14. People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
– Eric Hoffer
15. If you don’t want to do something, one excuse is as good as another.
– Anonymous
16. To a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters. It is the only reality in an eternity of nothingness, and he clings to it with shameless despair.
– Eric Hoffer, 2002
17. Beating heroin is child’s play compared to beating your childhood.
– Stephen King, The Waste Lands
18. He was falling between glacial walls, he didn’t know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls…
– Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
19. Opium teaches only one thing, which is that aside from physical sufffering, there is nothing real.
– André Malraux
20. Denying money to the State is like denying heroin to an addict.
– DMA
21. The nice thing about being a heroin addict is that you either have no problems or one big one.
– Richard Schuldenfrei
22. The idea of getting a, you know, syringe full of heroin and shooting it in the vein under my cock right now seems like almost a productive act.
– Bill Hicks
23. A troubled life beats having no life at all.
– Richard M. Cohen
24. It did not feel like something that was going to take over my life and destroy it. It felt like a subtle flower instead of a manipulative demon. That’s the mystery of heroin.
– Corey Feldman
25. He had loved heroin more than it loved him. I was shocked beyond imagining; he was the first of my friends to fall.
– Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose:
26. The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is, are the ones who have gone over.
– Hunter S. Thompson
27. Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.
– William S. Burroughs
28. It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don’t need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.
– Nick Hornby, How to Be Good
29. It doesn’t matter if the drowning person has strong moral fiber. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a good or a bad person, once you become addicted to drugs. What happens next is inevitable. It’s a natural process that happens in everyone’s brain, once the drugs take over. So don’t ever fool yourself into thinking that only weak or bad people get addicted.
– Oliver Markus, Sex and Crime: Oliver’s Strange Journey
30. Government is the Opiate of the Liberal.
– DMA
31. Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.
– Steven Wright
32. Excuses are like belly buttons, everyone has one.
– Anonymous
33. Heroin gave me wings, but took away the sky.
– Drew Gates, The Crooked Beat
34. You cannot have your heroin and shoot it too.
– Anonymous
35. Amongst the remedies it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium.
– Thomas Sydenham
36. You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don’t want to understand you.
– Anton Chekhov
37. Anyone taking heroin is thinking about taking heroin more than they’re thinking about anything else. That’s the general rule about most drugs.
– Mick Jagger
38. Never curse a fall. The ground is where humility lives.
– Yasmin Mogahed
39. In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
– Theodore Roosevelt
40. Heaven never helps the man who will not help himself.
– Sophocles
41. The vine bears three kinds of grapes: the first of pleasure, the second of intoxication, the third of disgust.
– Diogenes
42. Every worthy act is difficult. Ascent is always difficult. Descent is easy and often slippery.
– Mahatma Gandhi
43.
Q: The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
A: The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.
The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict.
― William S. Burroughs (Junky, Prologue page xxxviii)
44. Find what you like, and let it kill you.
– Kinky Friedman
45. I am sorry for filling you with beer and bad thoughts and then asking you why you shook. I am sorry for pinching you, for hitting you, for bruising the thin-skinned parts of you. I am sorry for the names I called you when we were fighting. You are not ugly. You are not useless. You would not be better off gone. I’m sorry for almost throwing you out into the street because my sadness was too much for me. I’m sorry for carving my fingernails into your thigh and then resenting the way people asked, “How’d that happen?” I’m sorry for plucking you and knicking your calves with drugstore razors. I’m sorry I let some people see you in the moonlight. They didn’t deserve to know the color of your hips like I do. I’m sorry for leaving you convulsing over a toilet bowl over some boy. I’m sorry I did not thank you for simply trying to take me where I wanted to go. I’m sorry I screamed at you to shrink, shrink, shrink when all you could do was grow. I’m sorry that this apology is ten years too late. I’m sorry that it will probably come again. I’m sorry that I do not treat anybody else as poorly as I have treated you. I’m sorry that I am constantly learning how to love you, when you have never once doubted how you feel about me. I’m sorry.
– Lora Mathis
46.A year from now you will wish you had started today.
– Karen Lamb
Quotations about heroin
We collected the most insightful heroin quotes we could find, in an effort to reveal the torments, traps, and tragedies of drug addiction.
