Augusten Burroughs famous quotes

I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Inspirational #Life #Beautiful

Childhood is what ended me up in the hospital and teetering on the edge of deathly alcoholism. It was really good for me to accept it. To accept all the embarrassment and the shame so I don't feel like I used to.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Childhood #Shame #Embarrassment

Acceptance, when it comes, arrives in waves: Listen with your chest. You will feel a pendulum swing within you, favoring one direction or another. And that is your answer. The answer is always inside your chest. The right choice weighs more. That's how you know. It causes you to lean in its direction.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Acceptance #One Direction #Swings

In order for us [people] to progress, we need brilliance and brilliance isn't fair and it's not polite and we can't grow it. It happens. Genius happens and it doesn't always happen in a zip code where we can access it. Therefore, we kind of need [Internet] not to keep tabs on everybody but we need to give them access to everybody else.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Order #People #Giving

There is no shame in being hungry for another person. There is no shame in wanting very much to share your life with somebody.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Shame #Hungry #Share

A lot of people can be afraid of the masking because people can misrepresent themselves [in the Internet] and they can pose as people they're not. Well, yeah; that's true. That's one side of it. But the other side of it is that it equalizes you and if you happen to be a person who is not equal in the eyes of the greater society that's a damn good thing.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Eye #People #Sides

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

#Memories #Past #Focus

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

#San Francisco #Worry #Age

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

#Life #Might #Worried

The most important thing for a writer to do is to write. It really doesn't matter what you write as long as you are able to write fluidly, very quickly, very effortlessly. It needs to become not second nature but really first nature to you. And read; you need to read and you need to read excellent books and then some bad books. Not as many bad books, but some bad books, so that you can see what both look like and why both are what they are.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Book #Writing #Long

You are allowed to be alive. You are allowed to be somebody different. You are allowed to not say goodbye to anybody or explain a single thing to anyone, ever.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Goodbye #Saying Goodbye #Different

The thing for someone just starting off [in writing] is to write. You need to have limber fingers, whether you write with your fingers or you type on your laptop, but you need to have a limber mind and you need to be able to write without judging what you've written, at least right away, and without editing right away.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Writing #Editing #Judging

Because here is the truth: If you want to have a chance at meeting somebody with whom you are genuinely compatible, never put your best foot forward.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Feet #Want #Chance

There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Writing #People #Interesting

I think I love him, but I also think that you can love people who aren't good for you.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#I Love Him #Thinking #People

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

#Writing #Math #Thinking

The truth is that nobody is owed an apology for anything. Apologies are lovely when they happen. But they change nothing. They do not reverse actions or correct damage. They are merely nice to hear.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Nice #Apology #Lovely

I suppose home is, for me, more of a state of mind. It's really more of about being where I want to be with people I care about.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Home #People #Mind

I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of people and then me, on the outside. Because how do you meet a new person? I was very stunned by this for many years. And then I realized, you just say, "Hi." They may ignore you. Or you may marry them. And that possibility is worth that one word.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Cities #Years #People

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

#Book #Writing #Two

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

#Kites #Months #Hours

I think that the Internet is our most profound and beautiful achievement. It is magnificent. We have the Internet as a layer of our thinking that doesn't control us, we control it, yet we don't have to be aware of it. It will be like a suit that really fits well.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Beautiful #Thinking #Profound

Not crazy in a 'let's paint the kitchen bright red!' sort of way. But crazy in a 'gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God' sort of way. Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the wax.p28
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Crazy #Kitchen #Gone

I knew that he was as reliable as a mathematical formula.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Mathematical #Formulas

Imperfections are attractive when their owners are happy with them.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Imperfection #Attractive #Owners

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

#Long #Hatred #Ruins

I was learning that if I lived slightly in the future-what will happen next-I didn't have to feel so much about what was going on in the present.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Next #Feels

Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Expression #Able #Faces

This is what you should know about losing someone you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Losing Someone #Someone You Love #Losing

His laugh is made if porch swings and lemonade
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Swings #Laughing #Made

You manufacture beauty with your mind
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Mind

I think part of the reason I'm attracted to Foster is because he's such a mess. I mean, the people I have loved in my life have never been easy to love. I'm not used to normal. I'm used to disaster. I don't know, as messed up as he is, he's also sort of exciting, sort of a challenge. I'm accustomed to working for love.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Mean #Thinking #People

I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Book #Writing #Years

You would be amazed by what you can give up, lose, or break, and yet still be a person who gets happy over brownies.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Happiness #Giving Up #Would Be

This is how you survive the unsurvivable, this is how you lose that which you cannot bear to lose, this is how you reinvent yourself, overcome your abusers, fulfill your ambitions and meet the love of your life: by following what is true, no matter where it leads you.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Ambition #Overcoming #Matter

Part of me believes that love is more valuable when you have to work for it.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Believe #Love Is #Valuable

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

#Math #Long #People

All children should be loved, protected, nurtured --emotionally and intellectually-- respected, and never, under any circumstances, underestimated.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Children #Should #Circumstances

Maybe you feel pressure to be positive because so many people rely on your good, fake-positive energy? If that's the case, screw everybody else. You're not a bottle of Valium.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#People #Fake #Positive Energy

Any damage that's been done, you have to fix yourself because it needs fixing and there is nobody else to do the work. Blame may well be justified, but it's not going to move you forward in your life.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Moving #May #Fixing

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

#Hands #Mind #Together

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

#Loss #Moments #Excited

If you hate your life, you haven't' seen enough of it. If you hate your life, it's because your life is too small and doesn't' fit you.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Hate #Life Is #Fit

Confidence is a reduction of your own interest in whether others are thinking about you and if so, what they're thinking.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Thinking About You #Thinking #Reduction

Think of the actual physical elements that compose our bodies: we are 98 percent hydrogen and oxygen and carbon. That's table sugar. You are made of the same stuff as table sugar. Just a couple of tiny differences here and there and look what happened to the sugar: it can stand upright and send tweets.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Couple #Thinking #Differences

You need to grab your dream out of the sky like it's a kite and pinch the string through your fingers until you reach the spool.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Dream #Sky #Kites

Love is a helium-based emotion; Love always takes the high road.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Love Is #Emotion #Taking The High Road

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

#Believe #Unique #Soul

Are you one of those people who says on a first date, 'I'm really not in a hurry to meet somebody, I figure if it happens, it happens'? Because those are the most desperate people of all. I'm just saying this so that if you are this person, you aren't hiding it from anybody. There is no shame in being hungry for another person. There is no shame in wanting very much to share your life with somebody.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#People #Firsts #Shame

The most I would do was use the shadow tool in Photoshop to bring out the muscular rips in my stomach, which were honestly there. Beneath the fat.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Rip #Shadow #Tools

It was a salad bar of phobias
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Bars #Salad #Phobia

Self-pity is the ***** of emotions: it absolutely disgusts people. When you're feeling pity for yourself, and somebody says to you 'You think maybe it's time for the pity party to be over? You should stop feeling sorry for yourself and try to think positive,' it makes you wish you could saw their head off.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Sorry #Party #Thinking

I understood at once, I am not living, but actively dying. I am smoking, living unhealthily. I’m shutting down. I need to go the other way, inside. And it was so clear to me what I was doing. It was suddenly perfectly clear. I understood, I need to write. Live here, in my words, and my head. I need to go inside, that’s all. No big, complicated, difficult thing. I just need to go in reverse. And not worry about what to write about, but just write. Or, if I’m going to worry about what to write, then do this worrying on paper, so at least I’m writing and will have a record of the anxiety.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Writing #Worry #Anxiety

If you find you require willpower, you aren't ready to lose weight.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Weight Loss #Willpower #Ready

The truth is humbling, terrifying, and often exhilarating. It blows the doors off the hinges and fills the world with fresh air.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Blow #Air #Doors

Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Smoking #Comfort #World

Bad news should be followed with soup. Then a nap.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Naps #News #Soup

You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Past #Mind #Your Past

While I liked hamsters, too, the Habitrail cage was expensive. Even I could see that the interconnecting boxes, tubes, and spheres could easily bankrupt a family and lead to addiction later in life. Because, how would you know when to stop? How could you stop? An entire city could be built with a Habitrail.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Cities #Addiction #Spheres

In the same way that a tornado rips the roof off a double-wide trailer, leaving the occupants dazed and staring at the clouds from the splinters of what used to be their living room, it was over.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Rip #Clouds #Leaving

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

#Zoos #Animal #People

I was like a packet of powdered Sea Monkeys and they were like water.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Sea #Water #Monkeys

The reason I know what we are to each other is because we fight freely and almost constantly, about even the smallest thing. In fact, once we didn't speak for an entire week because he didn't like the way I loaded his dishwasher...I can't decide if we're exact opposites, or somehow exactly the same except for minor cosmetic differences. I do know that all of his friends hate me and all of my friends hate him. We drive each other crazy in ways that nobody else can even touch. We never bore each other. And we both realize what a rare thing this is.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Hate #Crazy #Fighting

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

#Baby #Nice #Friendly

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

#Smile #Steps #Santa

your mind is like an unsafe neighborhood; don't go there alone.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Mind #Neighborhood

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

#Summer #Sadness #Firefly

My instinct was always have your gun in your hand. Especially when you are telling somebody to do something. But, in fact, the police academy discourages this. They feel your gun should rarely, if ever, be brought out of its holster. Most certainly not when children are involved, which is exactly when I saw myself using my gun most often. A truant teenager loitering outside a movie theater is going to be far more motivated to return to school when he has the barrel of a .45 pressed against his cheek.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Children #Teenager #School

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

#Mother #Air #People

Maybe it was a Patty Hearst thing. Stockholm syndrome or whatever it's called when you're being held against your will but then you become sucked in and fall in love. Or if not exactly love, you fall into something you can't see out of. 'I can't shoot a machine gun' becomes 'Hey, this hardly has any kick-back!
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Falling In Love #Love You #Gun

I gazed around the room and my eyes stopped dead on a little boy standing in the corner. This was a particularly eerie doll. Life-sized and blond-haired and blue-eyed. I saw a little Nazi boy, pockets probably stuffed with scissors and retractable blades. My grandfather on my mother's side was rumored to be half Jewish, which practically makes me Jerry Seinfeld's brother, and thus wary of blond German boys with their hands out of sight.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Mother #Brother #Eye

It was like living in a new house. I saw the undersides of tables, walked through the tangle of chair legs. It would be good to be a dog, I thought. You would feel safe surrounded by all of these leggy objects that never tried to run away.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Running #Dog #House

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

#Strong #Inspiration #Thinking

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

#Men #Differences #People

What police officer would dare ticket Death's minivan?
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Police #Tickets #Dare

You deserve to need me, not to have me.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Needs #Deserve

Like every child, I adored her. Until I formed a brain and got to know her.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Children #Brain

It’s a wonder I’m even alive. Sometimes I think that. I think that I can’t believe I haven’t killed myself. But there’s something in me that just keeps going on. I think it has something to do with tomorrow, that there is always one, and that everything can change when it comes.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Believe #Thinking #Alive

...handsome people are always interesting to watch. But a handsome person in crisis is riveting.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#People #Interesting #Watches

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

#Mistake #People #World

No matter how huge your loss, as long as you remain engaged with your life, the best days of your life may still be ahead of you. Don't misunderstand me: the pain of your loss will remain with you for the rest of your life. But great joy will be there right beside it. Deep sorrow and deep joy can exist within you, side by side. At every moment. And it's not confusing. And it's not a conflict.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Pain #Loss #Long

For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray [sic] days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks - accidentally - and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you're alive.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Suicide #Morning #Self Harm

Each time my mother went psychotic, I hoped it would be the last time. Afterward she would tell me, 'I think that was the final episode. I think I had a breakthrough.' And I would believe-for a few months-that it was true. That she was back to stay. Maybe it was like having a rock star mother who was always on the road. Were there Benatar children? Did they sit around and wonder if their mom's Hell is for Children tour was going to be her last tour?
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Music #Mom #Mother

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Writing #Thinking #Secret

I realized I could really become hooked on these happy pills. They gave me a glorious feeling of general well-being and didn't make me fat, like alcohol. I wondered if there was any harm in being addicted to only these.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Alcohol #Feelings #Pills

There's not enough of me left over.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Enough

There's never a false note in a Berg novel.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Notes #Novel

We haven't slept together. But we've napped
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Together

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

#Jobs #Fire #Hands

When people meet me, many times they're very surprised because they expect someone who is kind of wacky with seven piercings and very hip and cool and New York City, and I'm not.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#New York #Cities #People

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

#Creative #Trying #Nebula

I've just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I'm now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Father #Holiday #Two Sides

My only ritual is to just sit down and write, write every day.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Writing #Down And #Ritual

But I can also write in crappy motel rooms, while standing in line, or sitting in the dentist's chair.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Writing #Sitting #Lines

Time moves only forward, never back. We look forward to a moment and then it arrives and an instant later it is gone. Like something on the surface of a river that we reached for but did not touch in time and it carried on, away. You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Moving #Past #Rivers

Truthfulness itself is almost medication, even when it’s served without advice or insight.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Advice #Medication #Insight

Saying just the right thing after a considerable, awkward pause is far less effective than saying the wrong thing with perfect timing. I'm telling you.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Perfect #Awkward #Timing

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

#Drinking #Thinking #Littles

All of us are richer and more fascinating and more complex than we can ever know.
-- Augusten Burroughs

The most valuable moments and experiences that life has to offer are found only along its most treacherous paths.
-- Augusten Burroughs

#Path #Moments #Found