Top 100 Augusten Burroughs Quotes
#1. 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
#3. There just didn't seem to be anything to hold on to. We weren't going anywhere, and we weren't pulling away. We were just floating, suspended in liquid. And I guess I want more. And I don't know what he wants.
Augusten Burroughs
#4. I think people might think, oh, I don't want to approach the big famous author because it's embarrassing, but then they think for two seconds about it and realize, this is, like, a toilet bowl reader.
Augusten Burroughs
#6. Well you can be sure I'd stop forcing the poor Jews to tart up their humble little temple dedication anniversary into some corn-fed whore of a holiday to compete with our super-slut three-titted Christmas.
Augusten Burroughs
#8. 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
#10. 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
#11. Do not wait for the healing to arrive. It will never come. The holes will never leave or be filled with anything at all.
But holes are interesting things.
Augusten Burroughs
#13. So that's what I'm here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven't felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green.
Augusten Burroughs
#14. I placed my hand against the side of his precious, electric face and felt the stubble beneath my fingers. I was overwhelmed with the lust and wonder of it all.
Augusten Burroughs
#15. When your psychiatrist forgets to look at the clock and is hanging on your every word, that's when you know, out of all his patients, you are the sickest. He
Augusten Burroughs
#16. It's not such a huge deal when this happens at a 7-Eleven. It's pretty huge, though, when you spend the entire job interview trying not to come across like a box of hair and you come across like a box of hair.
Augusten Burroughs
#17. Only by embracing all that you regret and not denying it, only by placing the highest value on what you've gained because of all you've lost, does regret lose the ability to cripple you.
Augusten Burroughs
#18. 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
#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. Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when.
Augusten Burroughs
#22. At that moment it would have been easier for me to spontaneously grasp quantum string theory
Augusten Burroughs
#23. 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
#24. Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.
Augusten Burroughs
#25. 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
#26. Truth is not an opinion. It's a force like gravity. It's the most valuable substance known to man.
Augusten Burroughs
#27. The unfairness of your current status is unimportant. What matters is, can you do what you need to do? If
Augusten Burroughs
#28. Books are like that. Books just are. Sometimes books need to be, they need to exist and so they will body-snatch a writer and climb out through the writer's fingers and into the world where they belong to different people to different degrees and for different reasons. I
Augusten Burroughs
#29. Like cubic zirconia, I only look real. I'm an imposter. The fact is, I am not like other people.
Augusten Burroughs
#30. When you have your health, you have everything. When you do not have your health, nothing else matters at all.
Augusten Burroughs
#31. He'd been single for so long, and the more I knew him, the more I saw the loneliness at his core. I felt like I brought him to life. He
Augusten Burroughs
#32. See the anger for what it is: fuel. Pissed-off people can accomplish a lot if they don't just spray their rage fuel all over the place
Augusten Burroughs
#33. Awe, I discovered, was my favorite feeling. It was a rare experience, but when it happened, it was like an orgasm for the mind.
Augusten Burroughs
#34. I thought, I can't do advertising any more, so I was downloading all these PDF applications from community colleges. And I thought, I'll become a paramedic. I'll get a two-year associate degree, if I can get in.
Augusten Burroughs
#36. My attraction had been immediate and profound. And it had nothing to do with the way he looked. My attraction was to what resided between his lines.
Augusten Burroughs
#37. I wish I had a tray table in my bedroom and I wish I smoked, just so I could extinguish my smoking materials
Augusten Burroughs
#39. All children should be loved, protected, nurtured
emotionally and intellectually
respected, and never, under any circumstances, underestimated.
Augusten Burroughs
#40. Like somebody who was just happy because there was macaroni and cheese in the world.
Augusten Burroughs
#41. If you loathe your job, the situation is improved if you can do it in your underwear. Drunk.
Augusten Burroughs
#42. And I began to let him go. Hour by hour. Days into months. It was a physical sensation, like letting out the string of a kite. Except that the string was coming from my center.
Augusten Burroughs
#44. Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity.
Augusten Burroughs
#45. I'm like the guy who prepares your taxes or a dentist. I'm very conservative and boring in a lot of ways.
Augusten Burroughs
#46. Let the people who want to have kids, have them. And let the rest of us spend the extra money on ourselves. Being gay doesn't make you a bad person. Not wanting kids doesn't make you a bad person. Perhaps crushing the bones in one little girl's hand makes you a bad person, but that was an accident.
Augusten Burroughs
#48. How could something have no end, and if it had no end exactly where did it leave us?
Augusten Burroughs
#49. I wanted to shove her typewriter on the floor. I hated it and I hated her. I wanted to be a Cosby.
Augusten Burroughs
#50. Would like to chop you up into small, manageable pieces and grill you on a hibachi, then feed you to my shar-pei. But all that comes out is Welcome to moviefone!
Augusten Burroughs
#51. George had been surprised by my ability to leave him. He had not seen that in me.
Augusten Burroughs
#52. Nothing surprises me now, I tell him. I am stoic. I am Joan of Arc, with liver damage and an unused penis.
Augusten Burroughs
#53. The only other people who have had experiences similar to those of this man were locked up inside institutions for the criminally insane. The difference is, this guy gets business cards.
Augusten Burroughs
#54. One thing was certain: I would be in their Tang commercial. And if any of the other children tried to get in the way, I would use my pencil to blind them
Augusten Burroughs
#55. 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
#56. Fact: upon locking yourself our of your apartment you will immediately need to use the bathroom. Fact: and then you will stand in place and watch your door. You will just stare. As though rebuffed by it. As though it has done this to you.
Augusten Burroughs
#57. Despite evidence to the contrary, I hated drinking to the point that I misplaced really big slabs of time.
Augusten Burroughs
#58. In a way, I am a psychological transsexual, always trying to "pass" for a normal person but being clocked every time.
Augusten Burroughs
#61. The problem with not having anybody to tell you what to do, I understood, is that there was nobody to tell you what not to do.
Augusten Burroughs
#62. Everybody in recovery smokes. If you don't like smoking, don't even bother trying to get sober. Just stay drunk.
Augusten Burroughs
#63. This sounds fine with me, I like the idea of seeing a shrink once a week as maintenance. It's another chance to talk about myself without being interrupted. Plus, a shrink doesn't really know me, so I can present a more balanced picture of who I really am.
Augusten Burroughs
#64. No wonder I had found that woman so offensive. Sometimes things feel that bad. Sometimes you just feel like shit.
Augusten Burroughs
#65. Instead of becoming depressed that I was in the locked ward of a mental hospital, I pretended I was playing a role in a movie, possibly on my way to an Emmy.
Augusten Burroughs
#66. 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
#67. We never sampled our drugs because we were afraid of them, but to admit it aloud would have broken the spell.
Augusten Burroughs
#68. But I can also write in crappy motel rooms, while standing in line, or sitting in the dentist's chair.
Augusten Burroughs
#70. 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
#72. You should know, I tried for many years not to be in love with you, but I failed. And I really did try very hard. But it was not possible, and it never has been, because I have actually loved you from very early in our relationship. Possibly as early as our first meeting.
Augusten Burroughs
#73. What I like about you is that I've never met anybody like you in my life. You've got depth and you're funny and you have a sweet, good soul." A breeze from the water passes over us, "And I admire your strength.
Augusten Burroughs
#74. (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
#75. 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
#76. The Schnauzer listens to jazz. I listen to jazz because he likes it, and I have even gone to jazz concerts with him, but truthfully I would rather listen to retarded children pounding on pan lids with wooden spoons.
Augusten Burroughs
#77. 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
#78. To me, these people were as exotic as animals in a zoo. I'd never seen anything like them. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be one of them or simply live among them taking notes and photographs.
Augusten Burroughs
#79. Will I end up in Hell along with the Hamburger Helping Hand, Joe Camel and Wendy, the Snapple Lady?
Augusten Burroughs
#80. 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
#81. I sat up and my mouth tasted horrible, like stale pot, beer and Cheetos. The exact combination of ingredients that had caused me to pass into unconsciousness on Natalie's floor.
Augusten Burroughs
#82. On typical days, (dust) is simply irritating. On Roid Rage days, it made me want to stomp down to the highway, pull drivers out of their cars, and bash their faces into pavement; Suck up that dirt like a good little Electrolux, Jersey Boy Bitch.
Augusten Burroughs
#83. Oh, I had a great time. My thirty-three-year-old boyfriend said he wished they could package my cum like ice cream so he could eat it all day.
Augusten Burroughs
#84. The year I snuck an interracial lesbian couple into the background of an American Airlines commercial, I was feeling particularly flush.
Augusten Burroughs
#85. My mistake was in underestimating the emotional force of a song you have already hear a thousand times.
Augusten Burroughs
#86. The truth about not having everything you need, not being fully equipped or qualified or allowed is that these limits are the nebula of creative genius. When you have total freedom i.e: no limits at all. You stop trying to make the best of things
Augusten Burroughs
#87. As I sat in the hot, salty water, I thought, 'No wonder Mr. Bubble always gives me a urinary tract infection and hives.' Mr. Bubble was for common people. Mr. Bubble was for my so-called brother, their true child. I was a Vanderbilt. I should bathe in condiments and seasonings.
Augusten Burroughs
#88. It's neat how money smells nothing like anything in the world except money, just like cardboard.
Augusten Burroughs
#89. Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.
Augusten Burroughs
#91. My thoughts seem thick, ketchup stuck in a bottle. Like trying to feel someone's face while wearing goosedown mittens.
Augusten Burroughs
#92. I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness.
Augusten Burroughs
#93. Didn't every new thing you did become a part of you, one of your bricks?
Augusten Burroughs
#94. 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
#95. Turn off the light, she says as she walks away, creating a small woosh that smells sweet and chemical. It makes me sad because it's the smell she makes when she's leaving.
Augusten Burroughs
#96. I am tired from having lived seventeen different lives, compressed into the space of one.
Augusten Burroughs
#97. In some ways, blogging is like drinking - it gives a person permission to be a total asshole.
Augusten Burroughs
#98. 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
#100. Nothing made sense to me anymore. I knew I was young, I knew I was small. But I was worried that I might already be ruined.
Augusten Burroughs
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