How to Murder Your Life Quotes

“Here’s a life lesson for you kids: it’s much easier to go through something upsetting when you’re on drugs. The more intense the drug, the more you forget your problems! It’s basic science, really.”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“they have grown like flowers—bright thoughts along the psycho path that I can pick and gather when the forest feels too dark. It’s not always going to feel like it does today. You”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“Addiction versus ambition: it starts small.”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“I can’t handle this, I thought immediately. . . . without Adderall. My addiction finished the thought for me.”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“I will repeat the only advice which has ever really resonated with me re: pain—emotional as well as physical—which is: It’s not always going to feel the way it feels today. It’s just true & key to remember. It certainly helped during childbirth!”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“No one can make you feel anything you don’t want to feel,” my mother told me once, a complete delusion. He”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“Heath Ledger was on the little glowing screen in front of me in his nurse’s uniform, smoky eyes, and smeared lipstick, smirking as he set off bombs and burned the hospital down.”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“It went so dark inside of me. And it was dark outside, too, in those miserable after-Christmas months: cold and wet and icy. I felt like I was trapped inside a snow globe”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“But you know what they say: mo’ prescriptions, mo’ problems.”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“I would have swallowed arsenic if someone had promised that it would put me under for at least a few hours—that’s how bad prolonged insomnia feels. But eventually I gave up: on sleeping, on self-control, on my career, on myself. I gave up on all of it. I just fucking gave up. This”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“it. No more. I kept scribbling down “rules” as they came to me: NO HARD DRUGS. Ooh, wasn’t it fun counting these pills and organizing them in their cubes and opening and closing the plastic doors? They were like little pink pill-people living in storage units. La la la. No, drugs were not going to rule my fucking life anymore. This was a new era! I was in control now. I made the rules; I was in charge of how I felt! I determined what happened to—”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“I listed my triggers (carrot cake, deadlines, weight gain, mice, insomnia), studied relapse prevention, and learned dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) skills, which I liked because you could apply them to life, not just recovery. My favorite was “Teflon mind,” where you imagine your brain being like nonstick cookware: negative thoughts just slide right off.”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“It was warm for November. There was even a lovely drizzle, like God Himself was spritzing my face with Jurlique Calendula Calming Mist. I”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“Sure, it could have been worse—but, to quote Keith Richards on the end of his relationship with Anita Pallenberg: “It could have been better, baby.” We”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“NOW THAT I WAS OUT of that bizarre . . . sobriety fog, I could see everything much more clearly!”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“But eventually I gave up: on sleeping, on self-control, on my career, on myself. I gave up on all of it. I just fucking gave up.”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“The less I slept, the more emotionally and psychologically disorganized I became.”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“My parents were quiet in the car to the airport, but I couldn’t escape the voices in my head. You failure. You disaster. You disgusting girl. The self-loathing was like a radio station between my ears. Loser. You mess.”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“Worst of all, I couldn’t find my Xanax or my Ambien. I shook out the sheets; I dug through the piles. Finally, I left without them. Have you ever heard the thing about pillheads—that if you really want to see their addictions, just take their pills away? Yeah, this was gonna be bad.”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“We’d talk a little and he’d spot me the fifteen pills to get through the week. As soon as I got my next script, I’d pay him back. Then when Marco was inevitably short himself a week or two later, I’d spot him until his next doctor’s appointment. We never screwed each other over. Pillhead honor code.”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“By the time I realized my dream of being an editor, I felt like a zombie disaster trying to pass for human in a world where women didn’t even have split ends. I became more and more self-destructive as I realized I wasn’t cut out for the life I’d imagined for myself. Still,”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“Yep! I was twenty-six years old and an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America, and that’s all that most people knew about me. But beneath the surface, I was full of secrets: I was an addict, for one. A pillhead! I was also an alcoholic-in-training who drank warm Veuve Clicquot after work, alone in my boss’s office with the door closed; a conniving uptown doctor shopper who haunted twenty-four-hour pharmacies while my coworkers were at home watching True Blood in bed with their boyfriends; a salami-and-provolone-puking bulimic who spent a hundred dollars a day on binge foods when things got bad (and they got bad often); a weepy, wobbly hallucination-prone insomniac who jumped six feet in the air à la LeBron James and gobbled Valium every time a floorboard squeaked in her apartment; a tweaky self-mutilator who sat in front of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, digging gory abscesses into her bikini line with Tweezerman Satin Edge Needle Nose Tweezers;”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“It was great not having a roommate. I didn’t have to turn the lights off and go to bed, like, ever. I took my new medicine and stayed up doing homework late in the night, hyperfocused and erasing and reprinting my math homework. Branches would bang on the glass and scare the shit out of me; there was also a stupid owl out there that was ridiculously loud and hooty. So I was always practically falling out of my desk chair. (Stimulants make the nerves a bit . . . jangly, you know. Especially at three in the morning.) I”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“Inhale, exhale. When the heaviness finally came it felt so nice—like the lead X-ray smock they drape over you at the dentist. I forgot all about the Red Flower candle burning on the dresser. Black waves were crashing on my bed. I slipped beneath the turbulent surface of the water. It felt so good that I wanted to sink forever. Mmm. My eyes rolled back, my body relaxed, and I passed out to the Britney Spears Blackout album always looping in my head.”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“And you fall deeper and deeper into the earth, but it’s not the earth, exactly, it’s this series of . . . lofts built into the earth like underground tree houses, right, and another floor falls out from under you, and then you are on a different floor of the world, and you are starting to accept that things will never be the same.”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“I WAS LIKE . . . LIKE A GROUPIE FOR ALL OF THESE DOWNTOWN GUYS . . . I WAS—I AM—BULIMIC AND OBSESSED WITH MY LOOKS . . . I THOUGHT THAT MY BODY WAS ALL I HAD TO MAKE PEOPLE LIKE ME .”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“There has been speculation over whether I was fired or whether I quit; the truth is, when an addict leaves a job, it really feels like neither.”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“All of this toxicity comforted me. It made me feel less alone. But”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“PEOPLE DON’T JUST CHANGE OVERNIGHT, do they? But Marco did: from a sweet boy into a fearsome predator, a bully, a thief.”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“I will repeat the only advice which has ever really resonated with me re: pain—emotional as well as physical—which is: It’s not always going to feel the way it feels today. It’s just true & key to remember.”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life