Top 90 David Sheff Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I didn’t cause it. I can’t control it. I can’t cure it.”

— David Sheff

Featured in: Recovery Quotes, Mental Health Quotes, Depressing Quotes, Addiction Quotes, Sobriety Quotes

2. “This stigma associated with drug use – the belief that bad kids use, good kids don’t, and those with full-blown addiction are weak, dissolute, and pathetic – has contributed to the escalation of use and has hampered treatment more than any single other factor.”

— David Sheff

3. “Al-Anon’s Three Cs: “You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, you can’t cure it.”

— David Sheff

4. “A world of contradictions, wherein everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white.”

— David Sheff

5. “It is still so easy to forget that addiction is not curable. It is a lifelong disease that can go into remission, that is manageable if the one who is stricken does the hard, hard work, but it is incurable.”

— David Sheff

6. “An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie about it. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.” Part of me is convinced that he actually believes that he will find it for you.”

— David Sheff

7. “An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie to you. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.”

— David Sheff

8. “Wherever you be, wherever you may, seek the truth, strive for the beautiful, achieve the good.”

— David Sheff

9. “Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.”

— David Sheff

10. “How innocent we are of our mistakes and how we responsible we are for them.”

— David Sheff

11. “If Nic were not ill he would not lie. If Nic were not ill he would not steal. If Nic were not ill he would not terrorize his family. He would not forsake his friends, his mother, Karen, Jasper, and Daisy, and he would not forsake me. He would not. He has a disease, but addiction is the most baffling of all diseases, unique in the blame, shame, and humiliation that accompany it.”

— David Sheff

12. “I am becoming used to an overwhelming, grinding mixture of anger and worry...”

— David Sheff

13. “It may be true that suffering builds character, but it also damages people.”

— David Sheff

14. “Our children live or die with or without us. No matter what we do, no matter how we agonize or obsess, we cannot choose for our children whether they live or die. It is a devastating realization, but also liberating. I finally chose life for myself.”

— David Sheff

15. “Don’t confront me with my failures. I have not forgotten them.”

— David Sheff

16. “Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.”

— David Sheff

17. “How can both Nics, the loving and considerate and generous one, and the self-obsessed and self-destructive one, be the same person?”

— David Sheff

18. “Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying.”

— David Sheff

19. “Fortunately there is a beautiful boy, unfortunately he has a terrible disease. Fortunately there is love and joy, unfortunately there is pain and misery. Fortunately this story is not over.”

— David Sheff

20. “There is much good, but to enjoy the beauty, the love, one must bear the painful.”

— David Sheff

21. “Some people may opt out. Their child turns out to be whatever it is that they find impossible to face – for some, the wrong religion; for some, the wrong sexuality; for some, a drug addict. They close the door. Click. Like in mafia movies: “I have no son. He is dead to me.” I have a son and he will never be dead to me.”

— David Sheff

22. “I’m not sure if I know any ‘functional’ families, if functional means a family without difficult times and members who don’t have a full range of problems.”

— David Sheff

23. “We deny the severity of our loved one’s problem not because we are naive, but because we can’t know.”

— David Sheff

24. “At my worst, I even resented Nic because an addict, at least when high, has a momentary respite from his suffering. There is no similar relief for parents or children or husbands or wives or others who love them.”

— David Sheff

25. “When I transformed my random and raw words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters, a semblance of order and sanity appeared where there had been only chaos and insanity.”

— David Sheff

26. “Love cannot exist for long without the dimension of justice.”

— David Sheff

27. “When Sigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, Luigi, and Zelda, heard the complaints about video games, he simply shrugged his shoulders. “Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock ’n’ roll.”

— David Sheff

28. “Giving cash to a using addict is like handing a loaded gun to someone on the verge of suicide.”

— David Sheff

29. “Caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.”

— David Sheff

30. “Anne Lamott advises, “Try not to compare your insides with other people’s outsides.”

— David Sheff

31. “Nic is writing ‘I am sorry’, and I want to cry. No, I think, don’t let him in again. No don’t let him in again. No don’t let him in again.”

— David Sheff

32. “The hopeful part about that is when you do have that help, you will feel better. It still doesn’t make this easy. Nothing makes this easy, but you can make better decisions.”

— David Sheff

33. “Every time the telephone rings, my stomach constricts. Long after the euphoria from meth is no longer attainable – Tennessee Williams described the equivalent with alcohol in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: “I never again could get the click” – addicts are agitated and confused, and most stop eating and sleeping. Parents of addicts don’t sleep, either.”

— David Sheff

34. “As much as a child’s birthday is important to a parent, as much as twenty one meant to me, a year in recovery means more.”

— David Sheff

35. “The constellation of these impulses that we call love feels like a miracle. The miracles do not cancel out evil, but I accept evil in order to participate in the miraculous.”

— David Sheff

36. “The miracles do not cancel out evil, but I accept evil in order to participate in the miraculous.”

— David Sheff

37. “Even as all the experts kindly tell the parents of addicts, ‘You didn’t cause it,’ I have not let myself off the hook. I often feel as if I completely failed my son. In admitting this, I am not looking for sympathy or absolution, but instead stating a truth that will be recognized by most parents who have been through this.”

— David Sheff

38. “But it conveys the message that addiction is as biological a condition as multiple sclerosis. True brain diseases have no volitional component.”

— David Sheff

39. “You’ve got to wonder what Jesus was like at seventeen,” Anne Lamott wrote. “They don’t even talk about it in the Bible, he was apparently so awful.”

— David Sheff

40. “Thomas Lynch showed me that it is possible to love a child who is lost, possibly forever.”

— David Sheff

41. “The kanji characters he chose to make up the name of his new company – nin-ten-do – could be understood as “Leave luck to heaven,” or “Deep in the mind we have to do whatever we have to do.”

— David Sheff

42. “I can try to protect my children, to help and guide them, and I can love them, but I cannot save them. Nic, Jasper, and Daisy will live, and someday they will die, with or without me.”

— David Sheff

43. “Ha Jin writes: ‘Some great men and women are fortified and redeemed through their suffering, and they even seek sadness instead of happiness, just as Van Gogh asserted, ‘Sorrow is better than joy,’ and Balzac declared, ‘Suffering is one’s teacher.’ But these dicta are suitable only for extraordinary souls, for the select few. For ordinary people like us, too much suffering can only make us meaner, crazier, pettier, and more wretched.”

— David Sheff

44. “I know there is no point in haranguing him because he will just shut down, but I want to cover every angle.”

— David Sheff

45. “But you know, I don’t think I will be so scared to die. I think it’s like today: the end of a vacation when you are ready to go home.”

— David Sheff

46. “It was so sick, I started laughing,” she says. “I laughed and cried at the same time. That’s when it struck me that I can’t take my life as long as I can still laugh.”

— David Sheff

47. “What about people with high cholesterol who keep eating French fries? Do we say a disease is not biological because it’s influenced by behavior? No one starts out hoping to become an addict; they just like drugs. No one starts out hoping for a heart attack; they just like fried chicken.”

— David Sheff

48. “No matter what we do, no matter how we agonize or obsess, we cannot choose for our children whether they live or die.”

— David Sheff

49. “Substance abusers lie about everything, and usually do an awesome job of it.” Stephen King once wrote. “It’s the liar’s disease.” Nic once told me, quoting an AA platitude, “An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie about it. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.” Part of me is convinced that he actually believes that he will find it for you.”

— David Sheff

50. “Since reason and love, the forces I had come to rely on in my life, have betrayed me, I am in unknown territory.”

— David Sheff