Songfacts®:

• According to Trent Reznor, this song is about addiction to cocaine. He sings of the drug as if it were a woman:
  
  If she says come inside I'll come inside for her
  If she says give it all I'll give everything to her
  
  To sanctify is to make something holy; in this context, cocaine is a kind of religious experience for Reznor.
• Reznor's addiction to alcohol and cocaine ramped up throughout the '90s and nearly killed him in 2000 when he overdosed on heroin that he thought was cocaine. After extensive rehab, he got sober around 2003.
• This is the fourth track on Pretty Hate Machine, the debut album from Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor had various collaborators on the album, but he took total control. One of his cohorts was Richard Patrick, who went on to form Filter. Patrick was part of the touring band, but was left off the album with the exception of a guitar drone that leads from the end of "Sanctified" into the next track, "Something I Can Never Have."
  
  In a Songfacts interview with Patrick, he explained: "Well, that was really easy. My part in that whole thing was, [voice of Trent Reznor] 'Hey, Rich, I'm sequencing the record. I know you want to be on it. I want a segue between 'Sanctified' and 'Something I Can Never Have.' What do you got?' I came in with my rig and I made some feedback. I go, 'There you go. Try piecing that together. Can you use that somehow?' And he goes, 'Okay.' And he recorded it. And he goes, 'I found something great.' He did the double of it and just kind of snuck it in there, and that was it. That was my involvement on Pretty Hate Machine."
• The dialogue that comes in at the 3:20 mark is from the 1978 movie Midnight Express. It's part of a scene where the main character Billy Hayes, played by Brad Davis, reads a letter to his parents explaining that he was arrested in Turkey.