Top 100 Augusten Burroughs Quotes
#1. To stop drinking, all you have to do is sit. In 100 percent of the documented cases of alcoholism worldwide, the people who recovered all shared one thing in common, no matter how they did it: They didn't do it.
Augusten Burroughs
#2. (The new boyfriend) knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I'm writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I'm an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other 16.
Augusten Burroughs
#3. Should I just sit down, right here at carousel seven, and shake until somebody's arms are around me and they're saying, 'It's okay, I'm here, I'm here, come with me to the institute.
Augusten Burroughs
#4. Therapy could be of tremendous benefit to "getting over" one's past if the therapy is focused on specific ways to stop submitting to the temptation to obsess. Many people with difficult histories carry these histories with them, burnishing the past with each retelling.
Augusten Burroughs
#6. Despite evidence to the contrary, I hated drinking to the point that I misplaced really big slabs of time.
Augusten Burroughs
#7. People generally like happy endings, which is something I learned from my years in advertising. I like happy endings myself, but only if they're honest. I'm just as happy with a terrible, hopeless ending.
Augusten Burroughs
#8. You exposed your penis on national television, Max. What am I supposed to do?"
"I didn't expose it, Howard, it just sort of peeked out.
Augusten Burroughs
#9. I don't think writers -in general- ever achieve the fame of movie stars. For the simple reason that only a fraction of the population reads. But I guess there are exceptions.
Augusten Burroughs
#10. My mistake was in underestimating the emotional force of a song you have already hear a thousand times.
Augusten Burroughs
#11. The year I snuck an interracial lesbian couple into the background of an American Airlines commercial, I was feeling particularly flush.
Augusten Burroughs
#12. You have an incredible body. He reaches out to touch my stomach. I feel no pleasure in his compliment or his touch, only impatience. This is the only feeling. I feel like the paper on which my mood chart is printed.
Augusten Burroughs
#13. I once read about a guy who lost his arms in a fire. The nurse took pity on him and gave him a hand job. I don't even get that.
Augusten Burroughs
#14. All children should be loved, protected, nurtured
emotionally and intellectually
respected, and never, under any circumstances, underestimated.
Augusten Burroughs
#15. A big, friendly-looking man approaches me. "Hey, I'm Bobby," he says with a thick Baltimore accent, " ... and I'm an alcoholic.
Augusten Burroughs
#16. Most of us have love in our lives. Most of us love other people are are ourselves loved by others. But make no mistake: you are alone in the world. You were born alone, even if you were born conjoined. And you die alone, unable to bring a single person with you.
Augusten Burroughs
#18. Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when.
Augusten Burroughs
#19. Confidence is a reduction of your own interest in whether others are thinking about you and if so, what they're thinking.
Augusten Burroughs
#20. So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography - and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.
Augusten Burroughs
#21. I'll always write about what's going on in my life and the reason for that is it's not actually because I'm so fascinated with myself, it's because I can't think. I can't think like have thoughts in my head and think them through and come to a conclusion. It's like math for me.
Augusten Burroughs
#22. I don't worry about anything in the Internet age. I have been online since I was aware of it: 1985 in San Francisco. It has changed everything in my life. I would not want to even be alive in an era that did not have it because it is essential to our evolution as a species.
Augusten Burroughs
#23. It was a great story and I admired her. And I also felt a little envious. Because that bloody tampon had been a secret weapon. And every woman had one. But only a woman like Debby would be brave enough to use it.
Augusten Burroughs
#24. I wanted to shove her typewriter on the floor. I hated it and I hated her. I wanted to be a Cosby.
Augusten Burroughs
#25. If you loathe your job, the situation is improved if you can do it in your underwear. Drunk.
Augusten Burroughs
#26. Like somebody who was just happy because there was macaroni and cheese in the world.
Augusten Burroughs
#28. Normal people who weren't raised by mentally ill goats probably took the feeling of safety for granted. They only noticed when they suddenly felt unsafe. When the hands reach up for under the bed and grab their ankles, they scream, whereas I'm like Wait, can you scratch my knee before you kill me?
Augusten Burroughs
#29. Usually, they started with just two people bickering over something small. Like what to watch on TV. Then a third person would enter the room and see two people screaming over the TV and they'd decide to moderate, only they'd end up taking a side. Eventually, someone else would get sucked in.
Augusten Burroughs
#30. A tear wells in his eye. It wells and then spills down his cheek. And despite being pumped with booze and coke, I can read that one eye as clearly as a billboard for cigarettes. Only instead of saying Alive with Pleasure it says, I Have to Go Now.
Augusten Burroughs
#31. My window fogs and this makes me feel like there is no world outside of the car.
Augusten Burroughs
#32. Wanting to want something isn't the same as wanting it. I suppose what I really wanted, then, was to give more of a shit, because about certain things, I simply did not.
Augusten Burroughs
#33. Being busy is not the same as being focused. Being focused means being here.
Augusten Burroughs
#34. The truth behind the truth is this: even if you are a victim, you must never be a victim. Even if you deserve to be one. Because while you wait for somebody to come along and set things right, life has moved forward without you.
Augusten Burroughs
#36. When I was ten years old, I realized I'd been kidnapped as a toddler. Of course, I would have to have been a fairly dim child to miss the clues. Great big pink-elephant clues, trumpeting and lumbering and shitting through the house, ignored by everyone except me.
Augusten Burroughs
#37. I don't believe in the concept of a soul mate. Because we are all unique, but we're also simply too similar.
Augusten Burroughs
#38. A lot of being a writer doesn't have anything to do with writing. It's ironic - I have to squeeze the books in, even though that's what it's all about.
Augusten Burroughs
#39. Being an unhappy person does not mean you must be sad or dark. You can be interested instead of happy. You can be fascinated instead of happy.
Augusten Burroughs
#41. Fairness is not among the laws of the universe. This means, if someone runs over your foot in a car and they don't stop , that's just too bad and it totally sucks and you better bust your ass to get yourself to the hospital right now so they can save the foot.
Augusten Burroughs
#42. Shame is also a covert and effective bullying method. All those bullies from the seventh grade didn't simply evaporate. They grew up, too, and it's pretty safe to assume that the majority did not seek therapy on their eighteenth birthday to explore their disturbing childhood need for cruelty.
Augusten Burroughs
#43. Adam had smiled at him and Max had smiled back. And then they both just stood there in that awkward silence that happens when two people are attracted to each other but don't know what to do about it because they are strangers.
Augusten Burroughs
#44. Now he was the dish of wrapped peppermints next to the cash register that I didn't want because they were free. Because
Augusten Burroughs
#45. I understood that instead of being a treat for me, the Certs had been a mild compromise for him. By letting me believe they were a special something, just for me, he didn't have to actually think of a special something for me.
Augusten Burroughs
#47. But I think I would have been happier if the only thing that came out of his mouth was the sound of a turning page.
Augusten Burroughs
#51. Not all gay men send me penis pictures. But no straight men do. And to date, no woman has sent me a picture of her vaginal canal. 'I know it's a little stretched out, but I've had four kids. What do you expect? LOL.
Augusten Burroughs
#52. I always tried to learn Greek, but all I got out of it was, "poulaki mou." ["My little chicken."]
Augusten Burroughs
#53. The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We reexperience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can.
Augusten Burroughs
#54. I just look at her and she creeps me out. She looks like she would eat a baby. Not that she's fat. She just looks hungry in some dangerous way that can't be explained. She's always so nice and friendly. Exactly the disposition of a baby killer.
Augusten Burroughs
#55. She reminded me of a scatterbrained old Cadillac that had been driven into the ground but somehow kept on starting, without fuss.
Augusten Burroughs
#56. Part of me believes that love is more valuable when you have to work for it.
Augusten Burroughs
#57. The dark side of blogging is, of course, people can be (and are) just savage and uncivilized, deeply cruel and fully unaccountable.
Augusten Burroughs
#59. You can make almost anything a learning or positive experience. I think I offer a good example of how to make the most out of what life gives you and how to keep moving on.
Augusten Burroughs
#60. As I sat on the midnight PVTA bus to Amherst, I scanned the male faces, looking for a potential boyfriend. My standards were high: anyone who looked back at me.
Augusten Burroughs
#61. Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.
Augusten Burroughs
#63. I think people tend to see the bigger point, which is maybe not fitting in and feeling like you didn't have the childhood that you expected you would have, or that you felt lonely or struggled with drugs and alcohol or just that you were able to achieve your dreams.
Augusten Burroughs
#65. Decisions are beautiful. They are the evidence of thought and care. Decisions are the polishing cloths of life.
Augusten Burroughs
#66. The most valuable moments and experiences that life has to offer are found only along its most treacherous paths.
Augusten Burroughs
#68. I like it when she's shiny, like a star, like a guest on the Donnie and Marie Show.
Augusten Burroughs
#69. There is helium in his tone of voice, a lightness that means mischief.
Augusten Burroughs
#70. Just as I had long suspected, a person didn't really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people.
Augusten Burroughs
#72. And we were married and all the windows were open but the smell of flowers was so thick and sickly sweet. I felt like I might choke to death.
Augusten Burroughs
#73. I sit there and think how it isn't fair that I can't drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinking into a decade of hard-core drinking and that is why. I blew my wad.
Augusten Burroughs
#74. Handsome people are always interesting to watch. But a handsome person in crisis is riveting.
Augusten Burroughs
#76. I was like a packet of powdered Sea Monkeys and they were like water.
Augusten Burroughs
#77. I nodded again, but I knew I would not grow up to drive a bulldozer. It would be awful to be dirty all day like these men. I didn't say it, but at best I would keep one in the backyard, like a goat.
Augusten Burroughs
#78. I feel like they are two different things, and when I write books, they're just books. If they can be movies that's okay. But I would write a novel that couldn't be a film.
Augusten Burroughs
#79. Long marriages have ended in ruin over tiny and insignificant grievances that were never properly aired and instead grew into a brittle barnacle of hatred.
Augusten Burroughs
#80. Bookman isn't a stable man. He has a lot of problems that run very, very deep.
But he was really good at giving head.
Augusten Burroughs
#81. I made very good money and spent all of it every week. I lived paycheck to paycheck ...
Augusten Burroughs
#82. Stars should not be seen alone. That's why there are so many. Two people should stand together and look at them. One person alone will surely miss the good ones.
Augusten Burroughs
#83. It is always safe to see yourself truthfully. You never have to be ashamed of yourself, with yourself.
Augusten Burroughs
#84. We were particles that came together to form into star after star after star until almost forever passed, and instead of a star what formed was life ... This is why for you, anything is possible. Because you are made of everything.
Augusten Burroughs
#86. You weren't heavy at all ... the only weight you carry is on your shoulders. I wish I could carry it for you.
Augusten Burroughs
#87. It was not uncommon to walk in the door of their home and find my mother sitting on the sofa reading over a manuscript with shampoo horns sculpted into her hair. Anne Sexton's voice would be blasting from the speakers. A woman who writes feels too much ...
Augusten Burroughs
#88. I don't really think of my blog as a real blog. It's a lame blog. It's more like my when-the-mood-strikes update, or smoke signal.
Augusten Burroughs
#90. I don't have a fixed routine. I write every day but I don't "write" every day, if that makes any sense. In other words, I email with my friends constantly and sometimes I'll pull out something I've written and save it.
Augusten Burroughs
#91. Six hours later, when I returned, I was greeted at the door- and this before it was even opened -by the overpowering smell of vinegar. What were my neighbors thinking? That a douche-obsessed woman with a gigantic, three-foot vagina lived next door?
Augusten Burroughs
#92. He continues to smile expectantly. I take a step back. I don't want to catch whatever he has. He is a disturbing out-of-uniform Santa.
Augusten Burroughs
#93. Give that mint Milano back, you bitch. If you can't at least be polite, you don't get a treat.
Augusten Burroughs
#94. I came to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren't alone. Maybe God was simply that part of yourself that was always there and always strong, even when you were not.
Augusten Burroughs
#95. Sometimes when you work in advertising you'll get a product that's really garbage and you have to make it seem fantastic, something that is essential to the continued quality of life.
Augusten Burroughs
#96. God, I felt certain, did not mind that I didn't press my hands together to pray. I was casual, but I was sincere. I knew that God existed as the Correct Answer inside my chest.
Augusten Burroughs
#97. To be more confident you need to give a whole lot less of a shit about that other people think of you.
Augusten Burroughs
#98. Riding back from the grocery store, I realized my father was two men - one he presented to the outside world, and one, far darker, that was always there, behind the face everybody else saw. In my bedroom late that
Augusten Burroughs
#100. Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the wax
Augusten Burroughs
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