Augusten Burroughs Quotes

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.

You must hang onto the scraps of the bucking moment as if your sanity and life depended on it - because actually they do.

There are times in life when logic and reason and probability must be recognized, but then ignored.

As my friend Amy observed: "Divorce is like a Polaroid picture. What truly happened will develop over time and you will see.

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.

The dark side of blogging is, of course, people can be (and are) just savage and uncivilized, deeply cruel and fully unaccountable.

I would borrow the microphone and stuff it down the front of my pants, examining myself from every angle in the mirror

Thanksgiving was nothing more than a pilgrim-created obstacle in the way of Christmas; a dead bird in the street that forced a brief detour.

Freedom was what we had. Nobody told us when to go to bed. Nobody told us to do our homework. Nobody told us we couldn't drink two six-packs of Budweiser and then throw up in the Maytag. So why did we feel so trapped? Why did I feel like I had no options in my life when it seemed that options were the only thing I DID have?

My grandfather blasted in. "Aw now, hell, carolyn, don't go twisting the boy back up in knots all over again now that you finally got him straightened out. They aren't leprechauns, son. they're elves. Leprechauns are those little drunk motherfuckers from Ireland.

If you have one parent who loves you, even if they can't buy you clothes, they're so poor and they make all kinds of mistakes and maybe sometimes they even give you awful advice, but never for one moment do you doubt their love for you
if you have this, you have incredibly good fortune.
If you have two parents who love you? You have won life's Lotto.
If you do not have parents, or if the parents you have are so broken and so, frankly, terrible that they are no improvement over nothing, this is fine.
It's not ideal because it's harder without adults who love you more than they love themselves. But harder is just harder, that's all.

It was so extraordinarily out of the ordinary.

I paused finally and watched the trees for slashes of light, but saw none. As my heart settled and my ears became less occupied I listened and heard nothing but the thready pulse of the night. And I sensed that the hunt was over. I'd been prey and now I was not. Prey knows this. Prey knows when it has escaped.

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.

And as soon as I thought this, I tried to think of something else quickly. Because we were so close that I felt sometimes like she could read my mind.

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.

I love you, she said, and I knew she meant it because she spoke the words from the heart at the center of her chest. This, at least, had not been left behind at the hospital.

Now he was the dish of wrapped peppermints next to the cash register that I didn't want because they were free. Because

What I am certain of is that there's something wonky going on beneath the surface of what we call reality. Things are not as they appear. They are much, much more.

My question was:How did I go from merely seeing the dirty French Santa in a bar to being in his hotel room the next morning? And this presented me with an actual equation. How did one plus one equal old French Santa?

If you hate 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.

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

My window fogs and this makes me feel like there is no world outside of the car.

Granted, many of them were indistinguishable blobs in my alcoholic smear of a social life, but I knew how the mind lulled you into a state of perilous complacency when all you had was a personality and a disassociated voice. Meeting

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.

All a rainbow is is light that walks behind a raindrop and its colors fall out.

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

Just as I had long suspected, a person didn't really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people.

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

The more obsessed one is with getting thin, the more certain it becomes that one will never get there.

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

I said all the wrong things. Except when I was busy saying all the mean ones and in the end I hated everybody and everything.

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.

In the opening to the Mary Tyler Moore Show Mary's in the supermarket, hurrying through the aisles. She pauses at the meat case, picks up a steak and checks the price. Then rolls her eyes, shrugs and tosses it in the cart. That's kind of how I feel. Sure I would have liked things to be different. But, 'roll of eyes' what can you do? 'shrug' I threw the meat in my cart and moved on.

Lately, I am receiving numerous calls each night from telemarketers. They're calling with the frequent urgency of dumped boyfriends. At this point, I cannot help but wonder, is the entire telemarketing industry one big, jilted, clingy gay guy?

Because he will grip you by the shoulders and
wrench you around and he will bring his bristly
mouth to yours and blow
stars
down your throat
until you are so full
of
light

When you have your health, you have everything. When you do not have your health, nothing else matters at all.

Being busy is not the same as being focused. Being focused means being here.

Freshly brainwashed from rehab, I carry the bottle into the bathroom. I hold it up to the light. See the pretty bottle? Isn't it beautiful? Yes, it's beautiful. I unscrew the cap and pour it into the toilet. I flush twice. And then I think, why did I flush twice? The answer, is of course, because I truly do know myself. I cannot be sure I won't attempt to drink from the toilet, like a dog.

Like cubic zirconia, I only look real. I'm an imposter. The fact is, I am not like other people.

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

I discovered the bleeding when he licked my hand and left a swath of blood behind, death's autograph.

I felt a bottomless sadness. So completely alone. Like one of my stuffed animals at home that I was too old for now, that sat on the shelf in my closet, mashed against the back wall.

Life is too huge for you to possibly hate.

And she's a nurse. do you know how hard nursing school is? it's like medical school. so she's obviously smart.

I was desperate to discover what nothing felt like. It was the absence of something that attracted me. It was the start. Everything important originated with nothingness.

She was a rare psychotic-confessional-poet strain of salmonella.

He likes people because he likes to share in conversations. I like people when they have large checks for me.

This is what I'm saying; you hate your life.
But you don't know what life is.
Life is too huge for you to possibly hate.
If you hate 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.
However big you think your life is, it's nothing compared to what's out there.

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.

I'm like the guy who prepares your taxes or a dentist. I'm very conservative and boring in a lot of ways.

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.

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.

To live in regret and change nothing else in your life is to miss the entire point.

The truth is that life itself is brutally, obscenely unfair. Consider all those other millions of sperm cells that were just as good as the one that resulted in you, and where are they now? Dead, nowhere.

Nobody's trying to kill you, Deirdre. You're killing yourself.

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.

As charming as the room was, I knew it wouldn't work for me. I do not need charming. I need to be online, at all times. I need surge protection.

Because confidence is not the presence of anything at all. Confidence is a reduction of your own interest in whether others are thinking about you and if so, what they're thinking. Put another way, to be more confident you need to give a whole lot less of a shit about what other people think of you. Confidence is not something you feel or possess; it's something others use to describe what they see when they look at you. The experience others call confidence you experience as being at ease, fully yourself, and not self-conscious but rather task conscious. When

Where this healthy self-empathy turns into a malignant self-pity is at the arrival of resentment. "Fuck everybody. Nobody gives a shit about me. Fuck them all." That is self-pity and it is dangerous because it signals a lack of accountability for one's mental state and, worse, the outcome of one's life.

No matter how awful something is, you can always sell tickets.

I will please shut the hell up the day you please drop the hell dead

I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.

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

It was impossible to escape her. She provided no natural break in the conversation, and she spoke with such intensity that I would have had to abruptly shout "SHUT THE FUCK UP," punch her, and then run away in order to be free.

We had a wealth of something we didn't want, but the wealth itself was intoxicating and we invented games just so we could experience the sensation of having too much of something.

What I really want is to sit next to someone on an L.L. bean blanket on the beach in the fall and drink coffee from the same mug. I don't want some rusty '73 Ford Pinto with a factory-defective gas tank that causes it to explode when its rear-ended in the parking lot of the supermarket. So why do I keep looking for Pintos?

I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness.

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.

In some ways, blogging is like drinking - it gives a person permission to be a total asshole.

He smiled like a cat with fresh chipmunk blood on his whiskers.

As I move along the line, other food items are plunked onto my tray: a small salad of iceberg lettuce and bacos, a slice of white bread with a pat of Hotel Holiday butter and blob of red Jell-O with fruit cocktail trapped inside. Instantly, I feel compassion for the trapped fruit.

Dennis asked, "Do you enjoy jazz? Because I love it, and I know of a place downtown where we could go." "And then we can have broken glass and arsenic for dinner!" I felt like replying, because I barely tolerated jazz when I encountered it in elevators or dental offices. But I considered that when you meet somebody who really loves something, the high-road thing to do is to try to love it, too, so I wrote back, "That sounds great!

So if you think the job really suits you, be you.

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.

How could something have no end, and if it had no end exactly where did it leave us?

We haven't slept together. But we've napped

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.

And then it hits me. I'm not anxious, I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be so lonely because it seems catastrophic - seeing the car just as it hits you. But then all of a sudden, that feeling is gone and I'm blank. So it's like a door quickly opened, just a crack, to show me what a mess I was inside.

It turned out I had always been a smoker. I just hadn't had any cigarettes.

But she did love him. I believe it. I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention.

My mistake was in underestimating the emotional force of a song you have already hear a thousand times.

What police officer would dare ticket Death's minivan?

No matter what I've written, someone somewhere has come up to me and said, "Me too." The truth can be offensive, but it's always nourishing, in a way. You recognize it. You can feel it. And even if [readers] think, "My god, I would never get in those situations," within those ridiculous circumstances that I have created for myself, they know the way I respond is probably what they would do too.

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.

Even painfully shy and awkward people are not painfully shy or awkward when they are alone. The way to access this natural, comfortable alone-self when you are with others is by choosing to forbid yourself to wonder what "they" are thinking. Instead, force yourself to exist in the instant, then take it- and give it- as it comes.

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.

I had the same worry that we wouldn't later be able to undo whatever it was we were doing to ourselves.

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.

I'm always prepared for the worst. I was prepared to have the book come out, sell seven copies, and have to keep working in advertising, so it was just great that it was received so well and by such a huge audience.

Olives are the wishbones of the cocktail world; rarely are they freely passed along to somebody else.

His eyes are so clear and blue that nothing but clichés enter my mind.

As a young child I had Santa and Jesus all mixed up. I could identify Coke or Pepsi with just one sip, but I could not tell you for sure why they strapped Santa to a cross. Had he missed a house? Had a good little girl somewhere in the world not received the doll he'd promised her, making the father angry?

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.

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.

While there are some things from which you never heal, so be it. The truth about healing is that you don't need to heal to be whole.

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.

I feel dirty when I visit my mother. I feel that her intimacy is exposed. Her nightgowns are so thin that her flesh shows through them. Her need is like a vagina. And I do not like to see it.

On the one hand, I was happy to have a proper diagnosis. Aside from a trust fund and a royal title, that was really the only thing I'd ever wanted in life. On the other hand, I was offended to learn that my brain was defective. Or, I suppose I should say, "differently abled."
One thing I was not was surprised. Four generations of manic depression on my mother's side of the family. Three of autism on my father's side. Drug addict uncles, a pyromaniac cousin, a couple of schizophrenics and suicides, several flesh-and-blood geniuses, and a pecan farmer. You just cannot mix those raw ingredients together and then stick them inside my mother for nine months and expect something normal to come out. It's a wonder I wasn't born with a set of horns.

Like socks in a dryer, it had vanished into the ether.