Stahl Quotes

If you want to do something that really changes someone's life, the best thing you can do is make the person you're trying to help a participant in the process. ~ John Stahl-Wert

I know it sounds lame, but I have to dig the way you think, and I have to feel you get me. My whole fucking life, I pretended I could relate to chicks so I could get into their pants. Then once I got in, all I wanted was out again. ~ Jerry Stahl

Still ... I would have hugged my mother if we were the kind of family who hugged. If touching her weren't impossible. If her subnightie waft was not so utterly, fatally repulsive. That's how much I loved her. ~ Jerry Stahl

John Hawkes is amazing. I really want to meet that man; he's so good. Him and Ben Foster, and I'm a big fan of Nick Stahl - those are my three guys. ~ Rory Culkin

I wanted her and only her.
I wanted to be a part of her storm.
I wanted to feel my pulse against hers.
I wanted the bitter on her sweet tongue.
I wanted the sadness in her sweet syrup eyes.
I wanted the silence in her screaming mind and the enigma that is really quite simple- a complicated happiness. I wasn't willing to let go. I was falling completely, forever, into solid fucking love that was swimming through my veins.
I wanted to be the breath in her mouth and the rhythm in her chest that would beat only for me. ~ Shey Stahl

Still holding my breath, I worked the dull point inside and slowly, slowly drew back the stopper, plunged it back in, and exhaled. At last, my grateful spirit eased out of the fetid bag of humanity crumpled in that Japanese car, eased out and drifted overhead, until it floated high over the San Fernando Valley, far away from all these people who just didn't understand, far away and high above the awful circumstance of what now passed for my life. ~ Jerry Stahl

I can't tell people what flag to fly. ~ Lesley Stahl

The more you teach your people to not need you, the greater your value. ~ John Stahl-Wert

There's two kinds of people, kid: the kind who pretend they are, and the kind who pretend they aren't. Take my advice and don't be neither. ~ Jerry Stahl

I would, if one-armned and jonesing, doubtless have found a way to cook up a hearty spoon of Mexican tar and slam it with my toes. (I met a double amputee in San Francisco whose girlfriend slapped a bra strap around his throat and geezed him in the neck. Another triumph of the human spirit. But slap me if I get sentimental ... ) ~ Jerry Stahl

Sometimes, it's like you know what people think: You know what they're thinking, and you know it's wrong. All you want to do if change their mind, but you can't. ~ Jerry Stahl

There's no deodorant for desperation. ~ Jerry Stahl

It's different to miss somebody when they're still alive. When they die it's like, 'Okay, I'm sad.' You're supposed to be sad. When they just go away, when they disappear, that's a different thing. ~ Jerry Stahl

I was trying to understand my grandmother feelings. Why, when I looked at and held the baby, I felt I was floating, that I was on a high.... I keep wanting to burst into song!
So I wasn't crazy, & I wasn't alone. When a grandmother holds the baby, her brain, like a new mother's, can also be drenched in the bonding hormone oxytocin.
Aha! There it was. We grandmas literally, actually fall in love. ~ Lesley Stahl

My own theory is that people are just so desperate for somebody they can feel better than, in America. Now that everyone's going broke and working 17 jobs - if they have one at all - at least they can look at these guys behind bars and think, "At least I get to wear my own clothes to work." ~ Jerry Stahl

It was our story, played out on the open highway chasing sunsets. It wasn't an easy story to tell you. It was a story of kisses, lust, passion, youth, mistakes, lies, hiding, stupidity, judging, but most of all, love. ~ Shey Stahl

What we craved was drugs. What we had was each other. ~ Jerry Stahl

Becoming a gran exhilarated me with a new purpose. The change was so big & granular & unexpected, I wanted to understand it. .,.. Does it happen this way to all grandmothers? ~ Lesley Stahl

Junkies are liars. They have to be professionally. ~ Jerry Stahl

I think that a lot of people are in love with stress. It's the dirty little secret of Western civilization. People often mistake stress for fuel ... to me, stress is just another bad drug that I don't want to do. ~ Jerry Stahl

I always figured I myself would never be lucky enough to die, I'd just live on and on in this increasingly dreary spiral. ~ Jerry Stahl

You can't really compare hells. But I suppose the hell of being strung out on another person's addictive behavior is its own special thing. ~ Jerry Stahl

I always tell myself, when I remember the non-stop self-generated hell party that used to be my life, I wouldn't be here if I didn't go there. ~ Jerry Stahl

You're acting like a child! was one brave reporter's response when I denied his interview.
Was I acting like child?
No, I didn't think I was. They didn't understand any of this if they thought that.
You know, sometimes I wanted to take their hands and place the truth in it. I wanted to give them everything I had. Sometimes I wanted to act like they treated me and show them how childish I could be. I wanted to give them the weight of everything I felt and let them be the goddamn judge of this shit.
Sometimes I wanted to vent, scream, and give it all away. Here, you take my talent. Take my life you feel the need to criticize every moment of the day. Take everything I have and you deal with the shit. You see what you can make of it since you seem to think I'm doing so badly.
I wanted them to feel the pressure, the inadequateness, the letdown, all of it. ~ Shey Stahl

He hidden smiles, the stolen glances, we had always loved each other from opposite sides of our own storms. Only the two fronts had collided, one force. ~ Shey Stahl

This book, for me, is less an exercise in recall than exorcism. ~ Jerry Stahl

I began to understand that my life was measured in moments. There were moments that tested you, challenged you, and moments that could make you fall to your knees, begging for one more moment but you see, those moments defined you as a person. You need to take them as they come because before you know it, you're out of moments. ~ Shey Stahl

Sometimes I think life's nothin' but sittin' around watchin' pretty go bad. ~ Jerry Stahl

Our dirty talking quickly turned to "Do you need a good spanking?" which I enjoyed but when it turned to "Who's your daddy?" I slapped him across the face and told him to shut the hell up and just fuck me ~ Shey Stahl

The Adderall Diaries is phenomenal. With jittery finesse and a reformed tweaker's eye for detail, Stephen Elliott captures the terrifying, hilarious, heart-strangling reality of a life whose scorched-earth physical and psycho-emotional dimensions no one could have invented - they absolutely had to be lived. By all rights, the author should either be dead or chewing his fingers in a bus station. Instead, he may well have written the memoir of an entire generation. ~ Jerry Stahl

Happiness, to me, was no different than Mom's paprikalaced domino bars: something that looked sweet until you took a bite, and then made you want to vomit. ~ Jerry Stahl

I think there's a phenomenon of people who want to be around something that seems "dangerous." It makes them feel more real. ~ Jerry Stahl

You need an entire drama to construct your life around to avoid living it. ~ Jerry Stahl

It's as if there's a landscape - we'll call it childhood - which exists in our mind. It's completely familiar. Unspeakably familiar. Until in the middle of the night, when the sky is blackest, lightning cracks through the firmament. And in that crush of sound, amid the madness and the blinding flash, you see your world: home, trees, rooftops, your own hand, in an entirely new way. Illumined by fire. Flashed for half a second and then gone. And it's that image, that savage, rip-through-the-curtain vision, that lingers. Not the reality you see every day. Not the world you walk around in. No, it's that spookhouse glimpse, the scorching peek through the blackness, that stays in the brain. ~ Jerry Stahl

She felt that the diving image of Mme Stahl that she had carried in her soul for a whole month had vanished irretrievably ... And by no effort of imagination could she bring back the former Mme Stahl. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The art and act of writing - speaking just for myself - involves getting your proverbial ass in the proverbial chair. ~ Jerry Stahl

Look at you two. That- is the truth. ~ Ruta Sepetys

Opiates are, by their very nature, about forgetting. When you're in that narcotic haze, memory functions like some mutant projector, a hell-tuned Bell & Howard. As the film goes in one end, at the other end it's immediately eaten by some kind of acid, dissolving the second the events transpire. ~ Jerry Stahl

Just because I'd kicked junk, after all, did not mean I'd kicked being a junkie. And junkies lie. It's their primary addition. ~ Jerry Stahl

The sea had a way of re-energizing, of refreshing, of making one feel stronger and able to conquer life's ups and downs. They each let the strength of it seep in as they pieced the puzzle together. ~ J. Dana Stahl

I love live performance, but I am excited to try my hand at whatever comes my way. ~ Michael Stahl-David

Being in love is a strange thing. Even when you hate the person for saying or doing something, you don't stop loving them. You may want to or even go as far to say you won't, but when you love them, truly love them, it never goes away. ~ Shey Stahl

Life is never perfect. Even the strongest crumble and fall to their knees. Even legends say enough is enough. There's also a moment in time, a whisper of hope, a glisten of desire. It's a thread to a tie that brings a husband and wife together again. It's feeling him, it's feeling me, but it's feeling us. ~ Shey Stahl

Not until I stopped doing drugs altogether did I feel like a man. Not until I walked out of that fire did I have any idea what the word even meant. ~ Jerry Stahl

Let me tell you something. Boring women get a bad rap. There's a lot to be said for boring women. ~ Jerry Stahl

Society has always said: Make money. Artists have said: But there's something else. Cliché City. But in Hollwood there's the Big Lie that you can have both. A lie you want to believe. ~ Jerry Stahl

As far as I could tell, life was nothing but a forced march down a mined highway. Even if you did everything you were supposed to do, sooner of later if was your turn to step on a claymore. ~ Jerry Stahl

Beliefs are deeper than discoveries. They are eternal." Stahl ~ Algernon Blackwood

If I closed my eyes, I could almost count those soft hairs on the back of her neck. One day I'd even leaned forward, pretending to drop my pencil, and inhaled her until the top of my head started to steam. A scent of butterscotch wafted off of her, and it was all I could do not to plunge my face into her shag. ~ Jerry Stahl

I did not mean to sodomize Dick Cheney. ~ Jerry Stahl

Well, it was very interesting to play a character and stretch it over such a long time - 12 episodes. I had never done a TV show before, so week to week it was unclear what we would be asked to do. ~ Nick Stahl

There are stories you don't want to tell, and there are stories that scald your brainpan right down to the tongue at the mere thought of uttering. But you can't NOT. Even if you wait until your skull is nothing but a charred and smoking husk, the truth will still be in there, squirming. ~ Jerry Stahl

Not doing something crude right off is about as close as a guy like me ever gets to class. ~ Jerry Stahl

A tiny butter knife slices more skin off my heart every time I think about her. ~ Jerry Stahl

The back of my neck says; If you're close enough to read this, you better be pullin' my hair and spankin' my ass! ~ Shey Stahl

Did I get my picture in the yearbook under "Most Likely to Commit Suicide"? ~ Jerry Stahl

Being a junkie, when you broke it down, was nothing more than a crazed day job. ~ Jerry Stahl

All my life I'd gone for women who were a little off. ~ Jerry Stahl

I've always wanted to be a guy with a rec room. ~ Jerry Stahl

We weren't touching, but my skin could feel her skin buzzing. ~ Jerry Stahl

Jake La Botz is a creator of dark poetry and haunting song, the kind of music that gets in your bones and rides you for days, a sound and vision only those who've been to the bottom and clawed their way back up can generate. His midnight gifts evoke Hank Williams and Skip James as much as Tom Waits and Dylan. Not everybody will get this music - because not everybody is ready for the truth. ~ Jerry Stahl

When I told him about Jordan, out flashed pictures of his grandkids. This was how I was introduced to the secret society of grans. We're instant compatriots. If you want to break the ice with someone who's in the society, all you have to do is ask, "So how old is yours? ~ Lesley Stahl

❝ IF I WAS THE SAME PERSON WHEN OTHERS WEREN'T LOOKING AS I WAS WHEN THEY WERE. I DIDN'T KNOW WHO I WAS WHEN THEY WERE LOOKING. ❞ ~ Shey Stahl

The point is, everything, bad or good, boils back to the decade on the needle, and the years before that imbibing everything from cocaine to Romilar, pot to percs, LSD to liquid meth and a pharmacy in between: a lifetime spent altering the single niggling fact that to be alive means being conscious. More or less. ~ Jerry Stahl

She knew the secret of my creepiness. ~ Jerry Stahl

At 17, all I wanted was to be a famous junky. Like all my heroes. ~ Jerry Stahl

Sometimes what I did five minutes ago scared the fuck out of me five minutes later. ~ Jerry Stahl

The thing is, all my heroes were junkies. Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, Hubert Selby, Jr ... These guys were cool. They were committed. They would not have been caught dead doing an ALF episode. ~ Jerry Stahl

What made them love you now when they didn't before?
I'll tell you why. You had the balls to do what they never did. You got inside the car and pushed yourself to be the best. You did that. No one else did.
What they don't understand is that there will always be confessions that bared no sound and lived inside my head, my heart, and were my own desire. They were my own aspirations and something they never took the time to discover.
I race for me. It's not selfish. It's me being me.
I do it because that's what I am and what is embedded into every fiber of my being.
I race for the adrenaline, the power, the rumbling in my chest when behind the wheel. The sense of belonging in a sport that's quick to prove you're nothing but still, I race for me. That is what defined me. ~ Shey Stahl

My mom,Sarah used to tell me that you could be anywhere when you life begins but you wouldn't know it until it changed everything you thought you knew ~ Shey Stahl

All of us, at some point in life, choose our cliché. ~ Jerry Stahl

Her skin felt smooth and firm. Her hair smelled faintly of motor oil. Her mouth tasted like coffee. She was absolutely real, and it was the sexiest combination on the planet. ~ Jerry Stahl

Some say a sunset can be too beautiful for words.I'd agree with that.There are a lot of things too beautiful for words for me.To me, it was the earth's way of saving the best for last. ~ Shey Stahl

If someone asked you what color the sky is, what would you say? ~ Shey Stahl

A waft of sweet hash drifted by, and I wanted to float after it like Wimpy levitating at the scent of a hamburger. ~ Jerry Stahl

This was a relationship I wanted to savor, and put ahead of the demands of my job or anything else tugging at my time and attention. I now had a new first priority.

But there was something more at work here, something mysterious welling up inside me. It wasn't that I hadn't been told that becoming a grandmother was the best thing that ever happens to a woman. But what I couldn't get over was the physicality of my feelings. When I got into bed at night I would pretend I was holding the baby in my arms. I was infatuated. Dare I say it? It felt like - ardor. ~ Lesley Stahl

Who says you have to live for right now? What if you can have the greatest love of your life, but you have to relive the past to find it again? Who says going back to the beginning won't make you happy right now? ~ Shey Stahl

That's the thing about people you loved. They disappeared on you. I didn't know much at the ripe old age of fifteen and a half. But, for better or worse, I knew that. ~ Jerry Stahl

Mostly what I remember is the way things looked sometimes after I'd push down the plunger, sometimes when I got so high so fast I couldn't even take the needle out of my arm. I just sat back, head lolling on my shoulders like a balloon on a string, and everything, walls, carpet, couch cushion, my own hands, broke down to swirling molecules, reassembled as a million other things, and danced before my eyes before arranging themselves once more as reality. The endless cycle, that dance of molecules and their return to something solid, left me as drained as if I'd flown around the sun with veins for wings. ~ Jerry Stahl

How can you think that? Don't you see it, Ro? The blood that runs through my veins, the air that fills my lungs, it belongs to you. It's only ever be you for me. ~ Shey Stahl

It's not like I was an alkie or anything. Alcohol is for cleaning needles ~ Jerry Stahl

Time is a long long long time before the dawn - Crosby, Stills & Nash ~ Ricky Stahl

This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it. ~ Jerry Stahl

...it's not what people do, it's what they don't tell you they do. That's what hurts. That's what you think about when the television signs off and you're still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. ~ Jerry Stahl

The strict mother she & her brother had grown up with was body-snatched. "...Who are you? What did you do with my mother? ~ Lesley Stahl

I used to say, for me, writing was like walking a high wire, and heroin made me forget there was no net. Which is a fancy way of saying dope made me forget how shitty I felt for being on dope. ~ Jerry Stahl

Our love was dangerous.
It was asking me to come with him.
It was "South it is, brown eyes."
It was dancing in the rain on the hood of his car.
It was making dents that only we knew.
It was living in the moment and making memories and deals.
It was being in love and having your heart ripped from your chest. Here you take it, I don't want it anymore. It was that kind of shit.
It was "Please don't do this, not here."
It was here now, listen to me.
It was waiting, I water, and we waited. Nothing.
It was remembering every detail, everything that made him Dylan Wade and remembering nothing at all. ~ Shey Stahl

Have you ever been in love? It's a question you're asked a lot as a kid from your friends, adults, anyone. They're curious. How do you know you're in love? Do we even really know what love means? It's just a word to define a feeling. ~ Shey Stahl

Sometimes everything changes and you're left wondering how it happened and where you could have down shifted. ~ Shey Stahl

I don't do stunts and I don't think many actors do. For an actor to say they do their own stunts I don't think is very respectful of the profession of stunt men and women. ~ Nick Stahl

You can't see something shining if you're eyes are closed. ~ Shey Stahl

Not until you finally try to put down the stuff do you realize, with stinging clarity, precisely why you picked it up in the first place. All life, in this freshly nerve-flayed state, boils down to a choice of hells. The hell of being fucked-up on drugs or the hell of being fucked-up without them. ~ Jerry Stahl

Where are we going tonight?"
"To meet Eddy at the Brickyard again. It's Thirsty Thursday apparently."
"Oh no, not participating in Thirsty Thursday. Wasted Wednesday was enough for me."
"Just be thankful it's not Mystery Monday or Tanked Tuesday. ~ Shey Stahl

Mom lived in 709. Five doors down from 714, the number they stamped on Quaaludes. ~ Jerry Stahl

Can you understand this? Shooting dope is all about getting warm and fuzzy. Dependably so. But the Daddy-rush... Forget about it! I've never felt anything so terrifying! It's so real, even the pleasure can break your heart. Which, in the grand scheme of things, is what separates shooting smack from loving your little girl. Heroin may kill you, but it'll never break your heart. Not like a child. ~ Jerry Stahl

To get into the character you have to really use your imagination. ~ Michael Stahl-David

My life - and this hit so hard I nearly toppled over - my life was Apollo 13! Launched with high expectations and pathetically crashed. ~ Jerry Stahl

I have to admit, I wasn't close to my old man when he was alive. He was hardly ever home. But now that he was gone, and I was back in Pittsburgh, I thought about him all the time. I felt closer to the guy since he'd been buried than I ever did when he was walking around above ground. I realized how much I loved him. ~ Jerry Stahl

What do you mean he drew a dick on the wall...you mean like a man dick...Christ, I swear, the kids are not mine ~ Shey Stahl

If he didn't answer the door, why wasn't it acceptable to go through the window if it was open? ~ Shey Stahl