Augusten Burroughs Quotes & Sayings

I wanted to shove her typewriter on the floor. I hated it and I hated her. I wanted to be a Cosby. — Augusten Burroughs

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

Somehow, through a flip of the coin, I ended up here. Feeling like somebody at the top of the heart-lung transplant recipient list. Damaged but invigorated and fucking lucky. — Augusten Burroughs

In addition to calling each other standard names like bitch and whore, the Finches incorporated Freud's stages of psycho-sexual development into their arsenal of invectives.
"You're so oral. You'll never make it to genital! The most you can ever hope for is to reach anal, you immature, frigid old maid," Natalie yelled.
"Stop antagonizing me," Hope shouted. "Just stop transfering all this anger onto me."
"Your avoidance tactics are not giong to work, Miss Hope," Natalie warned. "I'm not going to let you just slink away from me. You hate me and you have to confront me. — Augusten Burroughs

She reminded me of a scatterbrained old Cadillac that had been driven into the ground but somehow kept on starting, without fuss. — Augusten Burroughs

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. — Augusten Burroughs

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

If you spend twenty years trying to get something and you still don't have it, is it admirable to keep trying? Or did you pass admirable several miles back and it's getting close to straitjacket time?
If you are no closer to having something you've been chasing for twenty years, your data is broken. Either you can't get it, period; you already have it; you don't really need or want it; or it's not real. — Augusten Burroughs

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

And I hope she does not live in a dark world. Because even the most terrible loss doesn't have to make you darker; it can make you deeper. — Augusten Burroughs

I think you're healthy in certain ways, and I think you're a pathetic disaster in others. — Augusten Burroughs

My worth depended on where exactly the decimal was placed among the zeroes. — Augusten Burroughs

I made very good money and spent all of it every week. I lived paycheck to paycheck ... — Augusten Burroughs

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

I can't tell you how much I love Target and Costco, that kind of culture, because it's something I never felt a part of. I've always felt like a tourist because I have never fit in anywhere. — Augusten Burroughs

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

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. — Augusten Burroughs

I always tried to learn Greek, but all I got out of it was, "poulaki mou." ["My little chicken."] — Augusten Burroughs

Well, somehow I felt if I sent Sally a donation, she would open the envelope herself and squeeze the cash into the hip pocket of her elastic- waist jeans. She would treat herself at Pizza Hut, using my envelope to dab pepperoni grease from her chin. I imagined her maybe having garlic cheese bread on the side and a salad of iceberg lettuce topped with blue- cheese dressing, Bacos and croutons. — Augusten Burroughs

On London Tonight, on television right now, a reporter is standing in front of a building that is under construction. It's windy, and the wind has pressed the fabric of his slacks against his body, outlining his penis. You can see everything - the length and width and the fact that he's uncut and hangs to the right. But I bet none of the viewers even noticed. In America, there would be letters to the station. There would be a lawsuit because a child was watching. The headlines would dub the reporter "Anchor of Shame" and he'd be fired. When our own Greta Van Susteren got her eyes done, it was front-page news for a week. So you can be sure, if Anderson Cooper's penis were to be visible in outline beneath his trousers, he'd be on the cover of People, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times. We are obsessed with sex in an unnatural way. — Augusten Burroughs

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

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

In preschool, when somebody hurts us, the teacher sees to it that the person who hurt us apologizes. It is ingrained in us from a very early age that inflicted pain or wrongdoing or unfairness should and will be corrected. Note the passive phrasing: "be corrected." We will not, as children, take control and make sure these amends are delivered in a timely fashion. — Augusten Burroughs

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. — Augusten Burroughs

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

If you meet somebody and they love you when you are your true, awful, not-ready-yet, boring, not cool enough, not handsome enough, not pretty enough, too fat, too poor self? And if you love them back so much it makes you calm? And they have flaws and you do not mind a single one of them? That means you get yourself to the church and you pull one of those priests out of bed and you have him cast one of those wedding spells on you. If you're gay and this happens, you might have to rent a car first and drive to one of the states that operates a few hours ahead. Because if you found that, you found it. — Augusten Burroughs

A lack of "self-esteem" really suggests a feeling of shame over being one's self. Shame is the landfill emotion. It's not organic, like joy. It was dumped there by somebody else. A manipulation. Shame is very heavy, dense disappointment; somebody else's, in you. Inside of disappointment is a deeper judgment: Less than. Inferior. Defective. — Augusten Burroughs

Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal. — Augusten Burroughs

Rarely do very handsome men allow their faces to run around without a leash. I am not very handsome, but I am above-average handsome, which means I have spent only one-sixteenth of my life in front of a mirror practicing facial expressions, as opposed to the maybe one-fourth that a very handsome guy might have. Yet I can tell you that if I had accidentally spilled coffee on a first date, I would have immediately made facial expression number 69b: Spilled Coffee on First Date face. — Augusten Burroughs

Where there is nothing, absolutely anything is possible. — Augusten Burroughs

I'm always prepared for the worst. — Augusten Burroughs

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

He was raised without a proper diagnosis. — Augusten Burroughs

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

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

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

Was I heartbroken or furious? I didn't know. I did know: that's it. Our relationship could not continue like this, out of balance, unequal.
And as surely as I knew this, I knew something else: But of course it can. We can continue to live exactly as we do right now, in a heavy-lidded state of love and unspeakable compromise. Isn't that what people do? Every day? Don't they ache but rename it tired?
It made me wonder: Was it even fair to expect the person you're with to be just as happy as you? Furthermore, how could you ever even know for sure? You couldn't, was the truth of it. You could not know this. — Augusten Burroughs

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

How many of the things I fear or dread are actually things that I want? — Augusten Burroughs

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. — Augusten Burroughs

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

My mother began to go crazy. Not in a 'Let's paint the kitchen red!' sort of way. But crazy in a 'gas oven, toothpaste sandwhich, I am God' sort of way. — Augusten Burroughs

This is among the oldest, deepest, most primal truths: the facts of life may be, at times, unbearably painful. But the core, the bones of life are generous beyond all reason or belief. Those things that ought to kill us do not. — Augusten Burroughs

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

We're all going to die eventually so why not have some fun. — Augusten Burroughs

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

Nothing worth having comes easy is not about showing up early at the office. It's about showing up in your own life. And living inside the very moment you want to run away from. — Augusten Burroughs

My brother had very specific likes and dislikes. Basically, he liked anything until it harmed him and then he was wary. — Augusten Burroughs

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

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

Happiness is a treadmill of a goal for people who are not happy by nature. Being an unhappy person does not mean you must be sad or dark. You can be interested instead of happy. — Augusten Burroughs

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

It was time to leave. He was insufferable, had toilet problems, looked demented to begin with, and now he was the accomplice to a cat killer. Yet did I leave? No, I sat there. And I thought, What has happened to me? Why am I not rising up off the sofa? Why am I not leaving? — Augusten Burroughs

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

To nobody's surprise, steroid use is common among gay men. When you combine a love for men with a love for drama, you end up with a guy on steroids. — Augusten Burroughs

One of the things I liked about her [Dorothy] was that she had long fingernails that she would carefully manicure and paint to fit her mood. If she were in a happy mood, her nails would be bright red. If she were feeling like she wanted to eviscerate her mother she would paint her nails burgundy. — Augusten Burroughs

The horrible thing about being sober is you lose your excuse for being so fucked up. — Augusten Burroughs

But even with my minimal amount of fame, there are certain perks. Recently, I was at a movie premier, and at the party after the movie, Meryl Streep was loose, walking around the room like a normal person. Absolutely nothing was preventing me from lunging toward her and shrieking Dingoes ate my baby! Dingoes ate my baby! — Augusten Burroughs

I tend to really enjoy being swept up in fiction. I love a good story and I admire fiction authors. — Augusten Burroughs

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

And of course, the answer came to me in the same way Jesus comes to those who drink in trailers: as an epiphany. — Augusten Burroughs

You see, even though back when I was drinking I thought nothing bad ever happened to me, something did. Time passed. A lot of time passed. In bars, at parties with people I didn't care for. It was always the drink. It wasn't about love or reading the Sunday paper in bed. Or housebreaking a puppy. Or anything that people call 'life.' It was about drinking. So actually, something bad, very bad, did happen to me. I wasted my life. And now, what little I have left, I want. — Augusten Burroughs

It was a salad bar of phobias — Augusten Burroughs

I go to sleep feeling impressed with the powers of the mind. * — Augusten Burroughs

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

Truth is accuracy. Without accuracy, you can't expect to manifest large, specific changes in your life. — Augusten Burroughs

Life is too huge for you to possibly hate. — Augusten Burroughs

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

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

I wish Rick would be gang-raped by a bunch of Muslim garbage collectors. — Augusten Burroughs

It is an awful, just sickening feeling, I discovered, to live with somebody, to exist in the midst of sharing a life, only to realize it is utterly doomed. It was botulism of the soul. I'd had such ambition for building a life together, because I wanted that strength of character and security. But I had overlooked the most important thing: he wasn't right for me. I wasn't right for him. Merely wanting us to be right and good together wasn't enough. — Augusten Burroughs

After Olestra (may cause anal leakage), people are a tad suspicious about products that do things that are too good to be true in the natural world.
I tell this to the account people, and they say, "But it comes from trees!"
To which I reply, "Yes and so does napalm and rubber cement. But that doesn't mean I'm going to spread them on my English muffin. — Augusten Burroughs

Except this "if we're meant to meet, we'll meet" attitude isn't truly relaxed. So we're not going to commend you for it. This attitude is more passive than relaxed. A passivity born of entitlement. You are owed a soul mate; this has been promised to you since birth. Everybody knows that. So why worry? — Augusten Burroughs

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

It then occurs to me that I am mentally unstable.
So I decided to close my office door and go online. Maybe I can do some research and find out what's wrong with my personality and then fix it. — Augusten Burroughs

Sometimes, people avoid recognizing how they feel because they believe the feelings are a part of them, and admitting to harboring anger or jealousy feels like admitting to a physical flaw. So certain feelings are denied. Which is something like believing your house is clean as long as you don't peek under the beds. — Augusten Burroughs

I never could have written the screenplay because I would have been forced to learn new software and I can't learn one more thing. — Augusten Burroughs

I'm an alcoholic who doesn't (and doesn't want to) drink anymore so I exist in a state of never-ending micro-addictions that reveal themselves in the form of obsessions. I was the same as a child. These obsessions are things I want, want to do, or want to be. I become so fixated I neglect every other aspect of my life. What results is that I get really good at doing a lot of different things but no matter what I do, it's never the thing that gives me the feeling, this is what I've been searching for, I am home. In other words, I never feel thin. One hundred percent of the time. It — Augusten Burroughs

Avoid self-pity by taking responsibility for everything that happens to you, even if somebody else is at fault. By taking responsibility, I don't mean play doormat. I mean, repair yourself. Move forward. Move on. Then, only then, see if you can wrangle some empathy. — Augusten Burroughs

Optimism sprouts from the knowledge that you are in control of your own life, not your past and not those around you. Part of being in control is taking responsibility for how you feel. This means not just admitting to uncomfortable feelings but then examining your circumstances to see what can be done to change these feelings at the source. — Augusten Burroughs

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 — Augusten Burroughs

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

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

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

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

It was unnerving, the way she could go from cool efficiency to sarcastic to sweet within the space of thirty seconds. I found it very manipulative and controlling. It put the other person constantly on-guard. And it was extremely intimidating because you never knew when she was going to snap. I made a mental note to refine these skills within myself. — Augusten Burroughs

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

I slipped on a turtleneck, laughing when my head became stuck in the turtle part. If they weren't called turtlenecks, I wouldn't have worn them. — Augusten Burroughs

The most mortifying fact of my life is something that happened when I was fourteen and I have never admitted to anyone: not to friends nor therapists; not even in rehab when we were detailing our own personal spirals of shame did I confess. It is this: I am a graduate of the Barbizon School of Modeling. — Augusten Burroughs

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. — Augusten Burroughs

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

I'm tired of living in the shallow end of the pool. — Augusten Burroughs

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

She's an excellent presenter and would have succeeded in advertising, is what I think. She generates a sense of excitement in the room and I become aware that my hands are moist with sweat, but not from fear. From needing to know what happened next. I like the drama. I glance around the room and other people look rapt as well. And I feel like, That's the reason to go to a gay rehab. People appreciate the drama. — Augusten Burroughs

I wouldn't want to waste any of my brain cells on forgiving if it's holding me back. — Augusten Burroughs

No wonder I had found that woman so offensive. Sometimes things feel that bad. Sometimes you just feel like shit. — Augusten Burroughs

The one thing that will finally make you feel you aren't missing something essential, such as the point. — Augusten Burroughs

Self-pity is the bestiality 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

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. — Augusten Burroughs

I felt ignorant, self-deprived, incredibly isolated, deeply and profoundly lonely and missing people, absolutely starved for affection, physically weary from alcohol, very depressed about my physical appearance, my weak muscles. Hurt and angry and sad — Augusten Burroughs