Augusten Burroughs Quotes

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

Source: Running with Scissors

“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.”

Source: This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't

“Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.”

Source: This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

Augusten Burroughs: Trending quotes

“You deserve to need me, not to have me.”

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

Source: Running with Scissors

“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 Quotes

“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.”

Source: Running with Scissors

Augusten Burroughs book A Wolf at the Table

Source: A Wolf at the Table

“Stars should not be seen alone. That's why there are so many. Two people should stand together and look at them. One person alone will surely miss the good ones.”

“I am prone to envy. It is one of my three default emotions, the others being greed and rage. I have also experienced compassion and generosity, but only fleetingly and usually while drunk, so I have little memory.”

Source: Dry

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

“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.”

Source: Running with Scissors

“Think of your head as an unsafe neighborhood; don't go there alone.”

Source: Running with Scissors

“We were young. We were bored. And the old electroshock therapy machine was just under the stairs in a box next to the Hoover.”

Variant: your mind is like an unsafe neighborhood; don't go there alone.
Source: Dry

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

Source: Running With Scissors

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

Source: Running with Scissors

“Turn off the light," she says as she walks away, creating a smallthat smells sweet and chemical. It makes me sad because it's the smell she makes when she's leaving.”

Source: Dry

“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.”

Source: Running with Scissors

Augusten Burroughs book You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

Source: You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

“I missed him so much that I had physical sensations of loss, all over my body. Like one minute I was missing an arm, the next my spleen. It was making me feel sick, like throwing up.”

“He's a really nice guy, if only I weren't me.”

Source: Running with Scissors

“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.”

Source: Dry

“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.”

Source: This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

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

Source: This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't

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

Source: Possible Side Effects

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

Source: Possible Side Effects

“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.”

Source: This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“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.”

Source: Running with Scissors

“Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.”

Source: Running with Scissors

“I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes.”

Source: Running with Scissors

“I hate news and information and anything that threatens to puncture the bubble of oblivion in which I live.”

“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.”

Source: Magical Thinking: True Stories

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

Source: This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't

Augusten Burroughs book You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

Source: You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

“I couldn't help but think, This car is taking me to a mental hospital and my mother is treating it like open-mic night at a Greenwich Village café.”

“Now I can addto my list of life's accomplishments.”

Source: Running with Scissors

“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.”

Source: Running with Scissors

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

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

Source: Running with Scissors

“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.”

Source: Dry

“Even when we lose an arm or a leg, there's not less of us but more. Human experience weighs more than human tissue.”

Source: Running with Scissors

“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.”

Source: This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“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.”

Source: This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't

Augusten Burroughs book A Wolf at the Table

Source: A Wolf at the Table

“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.”

Augusten Burroughs book You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

Source: You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

“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.”

“Perfection is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If you are a perfectionist, at least stop telling everybody you're one and try to get over it yourself, alone in your home with the lights off”

Source: Running with Scissors

“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.”

Source: This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“Throwing things horrified me. I suffered extreme, paralyzing anxiety when it came to anything remotely athletic. I wouldn't even run to catch the school bus because I knew I'd trip and then get teased for a year.”

Source: This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't

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

Source: Possible Side Effects

“He was raised without a proper diagnosis.”

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

Source: Running with Scissors

“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.”

Source: Running with Scissors

Augusten Burroughs book A Wolf at the Table

Source: A Wolf at the Table

“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.”

“Bad news should be followed with soup. Then a nap.”

Source: Possible Side Effects

“Tracy, the leader of the CDH group, looks at me with eyes that seem to belong to someone three times her age. It's something beyond wisdom, all the way to insanity and back. It's like her eyes are scarred from all the things she's seen.”

Source: This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“His laugh is made if porch swings and lemonade”

Source: Dry

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

Source: Dry

“Sometimes when you work in advertising you'll get a product that's really garbage and you have to make it seem fantastic, something that is essential to the continued quality of life.”

Source: This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.