Quotes from book
Running with Scissors

Running with Scissors

Augusten Burroughs

Running with Scissors is a 2002 memoir by American writer Augusten Burroughs. The book tells the story of Burroughs's bizarre childhood life after his mother, a chain-smoking aspiring poet, sent him to live with her psychiatrist. Running with Scissors spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

“The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin. A person would have to be an expert tightrope walker in order not to fall.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

“Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

“He was raised without a proper diagnosis.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

“Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

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

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

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.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

“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.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

“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 book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

“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.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

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.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

“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 book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

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

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

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

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

“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.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

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

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

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

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

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

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

“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.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

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.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

“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.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

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