Augusten Burroughs Quotes

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

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

What nobody understood then is this: The only way that you achieve what you want and fulfill your dreams and become great is by demanding that sort of attention. You have to make it happen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

It was a salad bar of phobias

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

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.

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.

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

It terrified me to consider: What if, as a grown-up, I craved another body beside me as still as this one? What then?

And I tend to listen to NPR when I'm not writing.

But my favorite band is Curbside Life, out of Chicago.

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.

My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron.

As a child, I was never drawn toward depraved or extreme situations; I really wanted a normal little childhood. Unfortunately, that's just not what happened.

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

I remember, no matter how impossible it seemed that any given day would end, it always did. This one would, too.

Everybody in recovery smokes. If you don't like smoking, don't even bother trying to get sober. Just stay drunk.

Never work with children, puppies or bulimics.

I did not consider him to be any kind of a genius. I considered him deeply lacking in the area that mattered most in life. Star quality.

I'm grateful for a lot of things. One is not being a drunk wreck. Or losing all four limbs in some ridiculous East Village bus accident that I was so destined for.

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

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.

And in my mind, this settles the issue. I would never drink cologne, and am therefore not an alcoholic.

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

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.

If I were blind I'd rather have another blind person leading me around because they know what I'm dealing with and they're experiencing the same things.

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.

The past doesn't haunt us, we haunt the past.

I hate feelings. Why does sobriety have to come with feelings?

I saw a monkey walking on a leash and thought it was an ugly foreign child.

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.

Once I decided to write, to be published, I knew it would happen.

I think writers tend to be experience junkies, and I think they also tend to want to be on the outside looking in.

I never get sick of writing my own stories because there's a certain comfort in knowing you will never run out of material. It's relaxing, actually, to write.

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

I knew that he was as reliable as a mathematical formula.

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.

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

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.

Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.

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.

Because I've lived in one room my entire life, working at the same table that you use to pay bills at and eat at. It's going to be nice to have actual space.

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

I love to both give and receive very old books.