Augusten Burroughs Quotes

After I got my coffee, I leaned against a stop sign and sipped, pretending it was a normal day and I was only up this early so that I could go running and not because I'd just been on a killing spree.

I never listen to music when I write.

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

I've learned how to turn the adversities in my life into enriching experiences. You can actually gain a lot from adversities and they make you the person you are today.

What I really want is to sit next to someone under 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 it's rear-ended in the parking lot of the supermarket. So why do I keep looking for Pintos?

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

There is no shame in being hungry for another person. There is no shame in wanting very much to share your life with somebody.

Most everybody had made at least one bad, drunken decision in their lives. Called an ex at two in the morning. Or perhaps has a little too much to drink on a second date and wept inconsolably while revealing how simply damaged one was, while nonetheless retaining an uncommonly large capacity for love. That kind of thing was, while regrettable, at least comprehensible. But waking up with someone generationally inappropriate, like your grandfather's best buddy?

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

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.

This is what you should know about losing someone you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.

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.

I was on the cover of a lot of newspapers. I was on the cover of USA Today for every single day for a month. I was on the masthead, so I tend to get recognized a lot, and in weird places. It's always flattering, and it's always odd. It's always at the worst possible time.

I gazed around the room and my eyes stopped dead on a little boy standing in the corner. This was a particularly eerie doll. Life-sized and blond-haired and blue-eyed. I saw a little Nazi boy, pockets probably stuffed with scissors and retractable blades. My grandfather on my mother's side was rumored to be half Jewish, which practically makes me Jerry Seinfeld's brother, and thus wary of blond German boys with their hands out of sight.

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.

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.

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.

Acceptance, when it comes, arrives in waves: Listen with your chest. You will feel a pendulum swing within you, favoring one direction or another. And that is your answer. The answer is always inside your chest. The right choice weighs more. That's how you know. It causes you to lean in its direction.

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

Dennis looked at the puppy in the window. We both did. It was the oddest thing. Normally, puppies in pet store windows sleep or pee or roll around on top of other dogs. This one ignored us its window-mates and was instead sitting with its nose pressed against the glass, looking at us with an extremely serious little expression on its face. An expression that seemed to me to be saying, "I am a sacred cow. Get out your wallet.

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

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

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.

I've overcome a lot - sexual abuse, death of a loved one, bad parents and experienced life. My nature is such I not only survived all this but I have thrived. I've always been psychologically ambitious in that I've never been willing to settle emotionally for anything less then what's needed. I've wanted more then that from life.

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.

I read a lot of science books - I love cosmology, quantum theory, particle physics. So my idea of a great read would probably put you directly into a coma.

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.

With my own memoirs, they are truthful, and I write everything fully expecting to some day end up televised on Court TV, and I'm fully prepared to be challenged legally on it. Everything I write is the truth and I know that I would win.

When people meet me, many times they're very surprised because they expect someone who is kind of wacky with seven piercings and very hip and cool and New York City, and I'm not.

You must never allow something that happened to you to become a morbidly treasured heirloom that you carry, show people, put back in its black velvet pouch and then tuck back into your jacket where you can keep it close to your heart.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

It’s a wonder I’m even alive. Sometimes I think that. I think that I can’t believe I haven’t killed myself. But there’s something in me that just keeps going on. I think it has something to do with tomorrow, that there is always one, and that everything can change when it comes.

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.

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

Truthfulness itself is almost medication, even when it’s served without advice or insight.

All of us are richer and more fascinating and more complex than we can ever know.

You can make almost anything a learning or positive experience. I think I offer a good example of how to make the most out of what life gives you and how to keep moving on.

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.

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

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