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This sounds fine with me, I like the idea of seeing a shrink once a week as maintenance. It's another chance to talk about myself without being interrupted. Plus, a shrink doesn't really know me, so I can present a more balanced picture of who I really am. -- Augusten Burroughs
Life is too huge for you to possibly hate. -- Augusten Burroughs
You must hang onto the scraps of the bucking moment as if your sanity and life depended on it - because actually they do. -- Augusten Burroughs
You should know, I tried for many years not to be in love with you, but I failed. And I really did try very hard. But it was not possible, and it never has been, because I have actually loved you from very early in our relationship. Possibly as early as our first meeting. -- Augusten Burroughs
I'll always write about what's going on in my life and the reason for that is it's not actually because I'm so fascinated with myself, it's because I can't think. I can't think like have thoughts in my head and think them through and come to a conclusion. It's like math for me. -- Augusten Burroughs
(The new boyfriend) knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I'm writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I'm an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other 16. -- 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
Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true. -- Augusten Burroughs
To stop drinking, all you have to do is sit. In 100 percent of the documented cases of alcoholism worldwide, the people who recovered all shared one thing in common, no matter how they did it: They didn't do it. -- Augusten Burroughs
Instead of becoming depressed that I was in the locked ward of a mental hospital, I pretended I was playing a role in a movie, possibly on my way to an Emmy. -- Augusten Burroughs
Pain is interesting. I dislike it immensely but I've never experienced pain and boredom at the same time. Even when I had unending and severe pain in my lower back for several years I was never bored by the pain, though it exhausted me. -- Augusten Burroughs
I know now: what is is all that matters. Not the thing you know is meant to be, not what could be, not what should be, not what ought to be, not what once was.
Only the is. -- Augusten Burroughs
Let the people who want to have kids, have them. And let the rest of us spend the extra money on ourselves. Being gay doesn't make you a bad person. Not wanting kids doesn't make you a bad person. Perhaps crushing the bones in one little girl's hand makes you a bad person, but that was an accident. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
Real optimism is not the pep talk you give yourself. It is earned through the labor involved in emotional housekeeping. -- 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
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
My question was:How did I go from merely seeing the dirty French Santa in a bar to being in his hotel room the next morning? And this presented me with an actual equation. How did one plus one equal old French Santa? -- Augusten Burroughs
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
Being busy is not the same as being focused. Being focused means being here. -- Augusten Burroughs
This is how you survive the unsurvivable, this is how you lose that which you cannot bear to lose, this is how you reinvent yourself, overcome your abusers, fulfill your ambitions and meet the love of your life: by following what is true, no matter where it leads you. -- Augusten Burroughs
But I can also write in crappy motel rooms, while standing in line, or sitting in the dentist's chair. -- Augusten Burroughs
I'm like the guy who prepares your taxes or a dentist. I'm very conservative and boring in a lot of ways. -- Augusten Burroughs
Delay is a gun pointed at the temple of confidence. -- Augusten Burroughs
All of us are richer and more fascinating and more complex than we can ever know. -- Augusten Burroughs
I remember, no matter how impossible it seemed that any given day would end, it always did. This one would, too. -- Augusten Burroughs
Being an unhappy person does not mean you must be sad or dark. You can be interested instead of happy. You can be fascinated instead of happy. -- Augusten Burroughs
I like it when she's shiny, like a star, like a guest on the Donnie and Marie Show. -- Augusten Burroughs
The air is so clean out here, so fresh. Reminds me of when I was a little girl in Georgia. Then she took More from her pack and lit it. -- Augusten Burroughs
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
I had always had the oddest feeling, consider it knowledge, that if I were ever to find myself inside the cockpit of a 767 with two dead piolets and afew hundred passengers in the cabin behind me, I would absolutely be able to land the ninety-thousand-pound jet. -- Augusten Burroughs
The horrible thing about being sober is you lose your excuse for being so fucked up. -- Augusten Burroughs
You deserve to need me, not to have me. -- 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
I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic. -- 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
As I sat in the hot, salty water, I thought, 'No wonder Mr. Bubble always gives me a urinary tract infection and hives.' Mr. Bubble was for common people. Mr. Bubble was for my so-called brother, their true child. I was a Vanderbilt. I should bathe in condiments and seasonings. -- Augusten Burroughs
I read The Old Man and the Sea but my eyelids bled from the toothpicks that I used to keep them open. -- Augusten Burroughs
I lay back against the pillows and stared up at the ceiling. I hated myself. I thought, I am just a destructive force in the world. Look at all the bodies I leave behind me. * -- Augusten Burroughs
When I was ten years old, I realized I'd been kidnapped as a toddler. Of course, I would have to have been a fairly dim child to miss the clues. Great big pink-elephant clues, trumpeting and lumbering and shitting through the house, ignored by everyone except me. -- Augusten Burroughs
You're at the crack addict's apartment? Having a little sandwich? he says. From the tone of his voice, you'd think I just told him I was hanging out at a playground wearing a NAMBLA t-shirt. -- Augusten Burroughs
Where there is willpower there is a Band Aid that's eventually going to fall off.
You only need willpower to get what you don't want or you only want to want. By want to want, I mean, something you wish you wanted but don't really. -- Augusten Burroughs
Like every child, I adored her. Until I formed a brain and got to know her. -- Augusten Burroughs
You weren't heavy at all ... the only weight you carry is on your shoulders. I wish I could carry it for you. -- Augusten Burroughs
I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness. -- Augusten Burroughs
As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward. -- Augusten Burroughs
If you find you require willpower, you aren't ready to lose weight. -- Augusten Burroughs
As I sat on the midnight PVTA bus to Amherst, I scanned the male faces, looking for a potential boyfriend. My standards were high: anyone who looked back at me. -- Augusten Burroughs
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
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
I could see jabs from his flashlight cutting into the woods on either side of me. He was back there, somewhere. The light beam was like a knife and I didn't want it on my back. -- Augusten Burroughs
Childhood is what ended me up in the hospital and teetering on the edge of deathly alcoholism. It was really good for me to accept it. To accept all the embarrassment and the shame so I don't feel like I used to. -- Augusten Burroughs
Truthfulness itself is almost medication, even when it's served without advice or insight. -- Augusten Burroughs
We never sampled our drugs because we were afraid of them, but to admit it aloud would have broken the spell. -- Augusten Burroughs
Should I just sit down, right here at carousel seven, and shake until somebody's arms are around me and they're saying, 'It's okay, I'm here, I'm here, come with me to the institute. -- 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
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
The truth behind the truth is this: even if you are a victim, you must never be a victim. Even if you deserve to be one. Because while you wait for somebody to come along and set things right, life has moved forward without you. -- Augusten Burroughs
Normal people who weren't raised by mentally ill goats probably took the feeling of safety for granted. They only noticed when they suddenly felt unsafe. When the hands reach up for under the bed and grab their ankles, they scream, whereas I'm like Wait, can you scratch my knee before you kill me? -- Augusten Burroughs
Eath, when it finally arrives, does so in a surprising fashion: it adds nothing to the room, not a light or a spark or a sound; death does not stir a molecule of the air. You know it arrives because there is suddenly a subtraction. You will feel it before you know it. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
It was impossible to escape her. She provided no natural break in the conversation, and she spoke with such intensity that I would have had to abruptly shout "SHUT THE FUCK UP," punch her, and then run away in order to be free. -- Augusten Burroughs
I could write another collection of personal essays from what has happened to me in the last year alone. I don't seek out my material - it finds me. I am magnetic, somehow. -- 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
I go to sleep feeling impressed with the powers of the mind. * -- Augusten Burroughs
I think writers tend to be experience junkies, and I think they also tend to want to be on the outside looking in. -- Augusten Burroughs
I wouldn't want to waste any of my brain cells on forgiving if it's holding me back. -- Augusten Burroughs
Turn off the light, she says as she walks away, creating a small woosh that smells sweet and chemical. It makes me sad because it's the smell she makes when she's leaving. -- 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
One minute we were sitting at the lowly kitchen table moaning about the sorry state of our lives and the next we were liberating the architecture with heavy projectiles. This was pure, freedom. Better than sniffing glue. -- Augusten Burroughs
I never question the way I write. Writing is the only thing that's without seams for me. It's an effort to talk because my pictures have to be turned into these sounds. It's an effort to be alive. It's work. But writing is wonderful. -- Augusten Burroughs
When your psychiatrist forgets to look at the clock and is hanging on your every word, that's when you know, out of all his patients, you are the sickest. He -- Augusten Burroughs
There are times in life when logic and reason and probability must be recognized, but then ignored. -- Augusten Burroughs
The Schnauzer listens to jazz. I listen to jazz because he likes it, and I have even gone to jazz concerts with him, but truthfully I would rather listen to retarded children pounding on pan lids with wooden spoons. -- Augusten Burroughs
Hope and God were buddies. Theirs was not a formal relationship steeped in ritual and tradition. It was more of a close yet casual friendship. -- Augusten Burroughs
The one thing that will finally make you feel you aren't missing something essential, such as the point. -- Augusten Burroughs
I was desperate to discover what nothing felt like. It was the absence of something that attracted me. It was the start. Everything important originated with nothingness. -- Augusten Burroughs
In a way, I am a psychological transsexual, always trying to "pass" for a normal person but being clocked every time. -- Augusten Burroughs
He'd been single for so long, and the more I knew him, the more I saw the loneliness at his core. I felt like I brought him to life. He -- Augusten Burroughs
Most of us have love in our lives. Most of us love other people are are ourselves loved by others. But make no mistake: you are alone in the world. You were born alone, even if you were born conjoined. And you die alone, unable to bring a single person with you. -- 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
Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity. -- Augusten Burroughs
We were particles that came together to form into star after star after star until almost forever passed, and instead of a star what formed was life ... This is why for you, anything is possible. Because you are made of everything. -- Augusten Burroughs
My parents had this relationship that was really terrifying. I mean, the level of hatred that they had, and the level of physical abuse - my mother would beat up my father, basically - and I think I was drawn to images on television that were bright and reflective. -- Augusten Burroughs
Despite evidence to the contrary, I hated drinking to the point that I misplaced really big slabs of time. -- Augusten Burroughs
I thought, I can't do advertising any more, so I was downloading all these PDF applications from community colleges. And I thought, I'll become a paramedic. I'll get a two-year associate degree, if I can get in. -- Augusten Burroughs
In the middle of the conversation, I open a third ale. I cup my hand over the mouthpiece so they don't hear the tab of the ale being popped. It dawns on me that this is a slightly contrary action. Like stopping into Baby Gap before having an abortion. -- Augusten Burroughs
Give me down. And give me the Polaroids of the fifty geese that had to die in the process. -- Augusten Burroughs
Therapy could be of tremendous benefit to "getting over" one's past if the therapy is focused on specific ways to stop submitting to the temptation to obsess. Many people with difficult histories carry these histories with them, burnishing the past with each retelling. -- Augusten Burroughs
I've never been able to stop the blockbuster disaster film from playing on an endless loop in my mind.
I see the terrible coming, whether it is or not. -- Augusten Burroughs
It was like living in a new house. I saw the undersides of tables, walked through the tangle of chair legs. It would be good to be a dog, I thought. You would feel safe surrounded by all of these leggy objects that never tried to run away. -- Augusten Burroughs
I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes. -- Augusten Burroughs
As I move along the line, other food items are plunked onto my tray: a small salad of iceberg lettuce and bacos, a slice of white bread with a pat of Hotel Holiday butter and blob of red Jell-O with fruit cocktail trapped inside. Instantly, I feel compassion for the trapped fruit. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
People generally like happy endings, which is something I learned from my years in advertising. I like happy endings myself, but only if they're honest. I'm just as happy with a terrible, hopeless ending. -- Augusten Burroughs
I knew that he was as reliable as a mathematical formula. -- Augusten Burroughs
We had a wealth of something we didn't want, but the wealth itself was intoxicating and we invented games just so we could experience the sensation of having too much of something. -- Augusten Burroughs
Wanting to want something isn't the same as wanting it. I suppose what I really wanted, then, was to give more of a shit, because about certain things, I simply did not. -- Augusten Burroughs
Well you can be sure I'd stop forcing the poor Jews to tart up their humble little temple dedication anniversary into some corn-fed whore of a holiday to compete with our super-slut three-titted Christmas. -- Augusten Burroughs
At that moment it would have been easier for me to spontaneously grasp quantum string theory -- 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
As my friend Amy observed: "Divorce is like a Polaroid picture. What truly happened will develop over time and you will see. -- Augusten Burroughs
There is nothing about MYSELF that I wouldn't reveal or write about. I don't care how horrendous or ridiculous I may appear in person or in print. There is great freedom in not caring what other people think. -- Augusten Burroughs
I referred albums to the more modern eight tracks. Albums came with sleeves which reminded me of clean underwear. Plus, the pictures were bigger, making it easier to see each follicle of Tony Orlando's shiny arm hair. -- Augusten Burroughs
Writing has enriched my life in ways I never imaged. -- 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
Usually, they started with just two people bickering over something small. Like what to watch on TV. Then a third person would enter the room and see two people screaming over the TV and they'd decide to moderate, only they'd end up taking a side. Eventually, someone else would get sucked in. -- Augusten Burroughs
I am tired from having lived seventeen different lives, compressed into the space of one. -- Augusten Burroughs
The Anti-christ of mental health and emotional maturity. -- Augusten Burroughs
So that's what I'm here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven't felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green. -- Augusten Burroughs
I think people tend to see the bigger point, which is maybe not fitting in and feeling like you didn't have the childhood that you expected you would have, or that you felt lonely or struggled with drugs and alcohol or just that you were able to achieve your dreams. -- 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 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. -- Augusten Burroughs
Resentment is anger looking for payback. It's also a high-interest-earning emotion. Each new resentment is added to the ones from before. Long marriages have ended in ruin over tiny and insignificant grievances that were never properly aired and instead grew into a bitter barnacle of hatred. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
I don't worry about anything in the Internet age. I have been online since I was aware of it: 1985 in San Francisco. It has changed everything in my life. I would not want to even be alive in an era that did not have it because it is essential to our evolution as a species. -- Augusten Burroughs
How the fuck did I get here? I thought. If I was going to be completely sober for the rest of my life, if I couldn't even have one drink at the end of a long and brittle day, then the life I lived needed to be a life from which I did not seek escape. -- Augusten Burroughs
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
Fairness is not among the laws of the universe. This means, if someone runs over your foot in a car and they don't stop , that's just too bad and it totally sucks and you better bust your ass to get yourself to the hospital right now so they can save the foot. -- Augusten Burroughs
Would like to chop you up into small, manageable pieces and grill you on a hibachi, then feed you to my shar-pei. But all that comes out is Welcome to moviefone! -- Augusten Burroughs
I love her handbag. Inside are papers and her wallet and cigarettes and at the bottom, where she never looks, there is loose change, loose mints, specs of tobacco from her cigarettes. Sometimes I bring the bag to my face, open it and inhale as deeply as I can. -- Augusten Burroughs
His laugh is made if porch swings and lemonade -- Augusten Burroughs
I love you, she said, and I knew she meant it because she spoke the words from the heart at the center of her chest. This, at least, had not been left behind at the hospital. -- Augusten Burroughs
His laugh is made of porch swings and lemonade. -- Augusten Burroughs
On typical days, (dust) is simply irritating. On Roid Rage days, it made me want to stomp down to the highway, pull drivers out of their cars, and bash their faces into pavement; Suck up that dirt like a good little Electrolux, Jersey Boy Bitch. -- Augusten Burroughs
I don't believe in the concept of a soul mate. Because we are all unique, but we're also simply too similar. -- Augusten Burroughs
If we happened to be in rehearsal downstairs in my room and a neighbor padded across the lawn to rap gently on the window and ask us to please be more quiet, Natalie might simply lift up her skirt and mash her vagina against the window while extending her middle finger. -- Augusten Burroughs
Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal. -- Augusten Burroughs
I felt absolutely nothing. It was like a door quickly opened, showing me what horrible feelings I had inside, and then slammed shut again so I wouldn't have to actually face them. -- Augusten Burroughs
I could not imagine the kind of person that would, upon seeing a crazy talcum-powder-covered Southern lady think to herself, Hmmmm, she might make a great new friend. The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin. -- Augusten Burroughs
Long marriages have ended in ruin over tiny and insignificant grievances that were never properly aired and instead grew into a brittle barnacle of hatred. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
The truth about not having everything you need, not being fully equipped or qualified or allowed is that these limits are the nebula of creative genius. When you have total freedom i.e: no limits at all. You stop trying to make the best of things -- Augusten Burroughs
When you feel spontaneously excited by something - a new career you never thought about, a haircut you see in a magazine and want - shame is the voice that brings you back down to earth. -- Augusten Burroughs
What I think of blogs is just this: Some are beautifully written and many are not. But even blogs that aren't necessarily "well" written are great for the person writing them. -- Augusten Burroughs
Everybody in recovery smokes. If you don't like smoking, don't even bother trying to get sober. Just stay drunk. -- Augusten Burroughs
Will I end up in Hell along with the Hamburger Helping Hand, Joe Camel and Wendy, the Snapple Lady? -- Augusten Burroughs
I don't think writers -in general- ever achieve the fame of movie stars. For the simple reason that only a fraction of the population reads. But I guess there are exceptions. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
Shame is also a covert and effective bullying method. All those bullies from the seventh grade didn't simply evaporate. They grew up, too, and it's pretty safe to assume that the majority did not seek therapy on their eighteenth birthday to explore their disturbing childhood need for cruelty. -- Augusten Burroughs
All a rainbow is is light that walks behind a raindrop and its colors fall out. -- Augusten Burroughs
You will either do so convincingly and well, or you won't. But at least you will be plugged in to the moment in the process. Not flitting just outside of it, trying to keep everything together like one of those little heel-snapping Sheltie dogs. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
How many of the things I fear or dread are actually things that I want? -- Augusten Burroughs
My brother was born without taste or the desire to be professionally lit. -- Augusten Burroughs
We were young. We were bored. And the old electroshock therapy machine was just under the stairs in a box next to the Hoover. -- Augusten Burroughs
Oh, I had a great time. My thirty-three-year-old boyfriend said he wished they could package my cum like ice cream so he could eat it all day. -- Augusten Burroughs
The unfairness of your current status is unimportant. What matters is, can you do what you need to do? If -- Augusten Burroughs
My thoughts seem thick, ketchup stuck in a bottle. Like trying to feel someone's face while wearing goosedown mittens. -- Augusten Burroughs
The more time I spent at the Finches', the more I realized what a waste of my life this school crap was. It was nothing but a holding tank for kids without bigger plans or ideas. -- Augusten Burroughs
I love to both give and receive very old books. -- Augusten Burroughs
It is astonishingly satisfying to look at him and think Closet Case, and know he can read my mind as he looks away flushed. All Mormons are gay, I believe. Rick is merely a further example. -- Augusten Burroughs
I understood that instead of being a treat for me, the Certs had been a mild compromise for him. By letting me believe they were a special something, just for me, he didn't have to actually think of a special something for me. -- Augusten Burroughs
Red hair is great. It's rare, and therefore superior. -- Augusten Burroughs
Awe, I discovered, was my favorite feeling. It was a rare experience, but when it happened, it was like an orgasm for the mind. -- Augusten Burroughs
I walked up to the house, rubbing my shoulder where it still hurt from the rifle's recoil. But soon, it wouldn't hurt because I would get used to it. It was amazing to me, what a person could get used to. -- Augusten Burroughs
Not crazy in a 'let's paint the kitchen bright red!' sort of way. But crazy in a 'gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God' sort of way. Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the wax.p28 -- Augusten Burroughs
I think out of seven billion people, there is probably more than just one soul mate. Surely, the paid employee in charge of each person's love life has taken into account the possibility of fatal snake bites and heavy falling objects. -- Augusten Burroughs
I steered my lips across his jawline and to his mouth. I kissed him. These were open-mouth kisses, young people's kisses, hungry and full at the same time, in love, at home. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
[Christmas] holidays are a heavy, heavy time. We make light of them with our red and green and our stockings and candy canes, but people think heavy thoughts over the holidays because that's when you're thinking about family. Are we close? Or are we not as close as other people? -- 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
I'm always prepared for the worst. I was prepared to have the book come out, sell seven copies, and have to keep working in advertising, so it was just great that it was received so well and by such a huge audience. -- Augusten Burroughs
Lately, I am receiving numerous calls each night from telemarketers. They're calling with the frequent urgency of dumped boyfriends. At this point, I cannot help but wonder, is the entire telemarketing industry one big, jilted, clingy gay guy? -- Augusten Burroughs
I'm not going to waste my energy looking into the eyes of someone like the guy who blew my legs off trying to find a way to forgive him for doing something that horrible when there are way more productive ways I could be spending my life. You've got to focus on moving on. -- Augusten Burroughs
And we were married and all the windows were open but the smell of flowers was so thick and sickly sweet. I felt like I might choke to death. -- Augusten Burroughs
Bad news should be followed with soup. Then a nap. -- Augusten Burroughs
Truth is accuracy. Without accuracy, you can't expect to manifest large, specific changes in your life. -- 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
Books are like that. Books just are. Sometimes books need to be, they need to exist and so they will body-snatch a writer and climb out through the writer's fingers and into the world where they belong to different people to different degrees and for different reasons. I -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- 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
I think I love him, but I also think that you can love people who aren't good for you. -- Augusten Burroughs
I was in advertising for years. That was cushy, you know? It's pretty cushy in a lot of ways, but I hated it. -- Augusten Burroughs
Granted, many of them were indistinguishable blobs in my alcoholic smear of a social life, but I knew how the mind lulled you into a state of perilous complacency when all you had was a personality and a disassociated voice. Meeting -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
Even when we lose an arm or a leg, there's not less of us but more. Human experience weighs more than human tissue. -- Augusten Burroughs
My worth depended on where exactly the decimal was placed among the zeroes. -- Augusten Burroughs
All I know for sure is that I have accidentally fallen through a wormhole in the universe and stumbled into someone else's grim life. -- Augusten Burroughs
And I tend to listen to NPR when I'm not writing. -- Augusten Burroughs
It was not uncommon to walk in the door of their home and find my mother sitting on the sofa reading over a manuscript with shampoo horns sculpted into her hair. Anne Sexton's voice would be blasting from the speakers. A woman who writes feels too much ... -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- 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
Maybe you feel pressure to be positive because so many people rely on your good, fake-positive energy? If that's the case, screw everybody else. You're not a bottle of Valium. -- 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
See the anger for what it is: fuel. Pissed-off people can accomplish a lot if they don't just spray their rage fuel all over the place -- Augusten Burroughs
I feel dirty when I visit my mother. I feel that her intimacy is exposed. Her nightgowns are so thin that her flesh shows through them. Her need is like a vagina. And I do not like to see it. -- Augusten Burroughs
But my favorite band is Curbside Life, out of Chicago. -- 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
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
I once read about a guy who lost his arms in a fire. The nurse took pity on him and gave him a hand job. I don't even get that. -- 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
When I first thought of being a writer I had visions of stacks of books in stores with my name on them, that sort of thing. But I never imagined this would be the reaction. -- Augusten Burroughs
The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We reexperience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can. -- 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
I wanted to shove her typewriter on the floor. I hated it and I hated her. I wanted to be a Cosby. -- 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
My life came complete with a factory-installed biological brother seven years my senior. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face. -- 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
I don't have a fixed routine. I write every day but I don't "write" every day, if that makes any sense. In other words, I email with my friends constantly and sometimes I'll pull out something I've written and save it. -- Augusten Burroughs
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
You would be amazed by what you can give up, lose, or break, and yet still be a person who gets happy over brownies. -- Augusten Burroughs
I like, though, that people have a hunger to connect with other people. They're desperate to know that you're not lying to them or misleading them. -- Augusten Burroughs
The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work. -- Augusten Burroughs
What police officer would dare ticket Death's minivan? -- Augusten Burroughs
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
Maybe one of my problems is I never depend upon the kindness of strangers. -- Augusten Burroughs
I realized I'd only seen him at night in dim, flattering restaurant lighting. The sun was not his friend. -- Augusten Burroughs
Nothing surprises me now, I tell him. I am stoic. I am Joan of Arc, with liver damage and an unused penis. -- Augusten Burroughs
My mistake was in underestimating the emotional force of a song you have already hear a thousand times. -- Augusten Burroughs
But I am not here ironically; I am here sincerely. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- 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
You know what we need? We need to get jobs, get the fuck out of that crazy house,' Natalie said, dipping a McNugget into her sauce.
Yeah, right. Jobs doing what? Our only skills are oral sex and restraining agitated psychotics. -- Augusten Burroughs
He was furious that the music house wanted forty grand. He wanted us to Jew them down -- Augusten Burroughs
I always tried to learn Greek, but all I got out of it was, "poulaki mou." ["My little chicken."] -- Augusten Burroughs
My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron. -- Augusten Burroughs
How can you really miss something when you never experienced it? -- Augusten Burroughs
After was better. Before was only there so After could happen. -- Augusten Burroughs
George had been surprised by my ability to leave him. He had not seen that in me. -- Augusten Burroughs
And that was one thing I didn't want: NO CASUAL SEX. I thought it was disgusting, the idea of just screwing around and then that's it. -- Augusten Burroughs
The events of the past cannot be fully understood when you are the only element of the past actively engaged in reliving it. -- Augusten Burroughs
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
We were alone together, we were an us. -- Augusten Burroughs
I discovered the bleeding when he licked my hand and left a swath of blood behind, death's autograph. -- 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
My brother had very specific likes and dislikes. Basically, he liked anything until it harmed him and then he was wary. -- Augusten Burroughs
I loved most when his eyelashes twitched and he blinked, and suddenly happiness was there inside his eyes. Unmistakable. Like a single word printed on a clean white page. -- Augusten Burroughs
I said all the wrong things. Except when I was busy saying all the mean ones and in the end I hated everybody and everything. -- Augusten Burroughs
Truth is not an opinion. It's a force like gravity. It's the most valuable substance known to man. -- Augusten Burroughs
I'm always prepared for the worst. -- Augusten Burroughs
If you loathe your job, the situation is improved if you can do it in your underwear. Drunk. -- Augusten Burroughs
Speaking the words aloud so they would exist in the world and begin to become real. -- Augusten Burroughs
When I ate vanilla frosting straight from the can, I could feel God standing right nest to me like a real best friend, watching, and smiling, and wishing he had a mouth. -- Augusten Burroughs
No wonder I had found that woman so offensive. Sometimes things feel that bad. Sometimes you just feel like shit. -- Augusten Burroughs
It is always safe to see yourself truthfully. You never have to be ashamed of yourself, with yourself. -- Augusten Burroughs
The truth is humbling, terrifying, and often exhilarating. It blows the doors off the hinges and fills the world with fresh air. -- 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
Part of me believes that love is more valuable when you have to work for it. -- Augusten Burroughs
Because all of us are made not only of what we have but what we lost. And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition. -- Augusten Burroughs
It was a great story and I admired her. And I also felt a little envious. Because that bloody tampon had been a secret weapon. And every woman had one. But only a woman like Debby would be brave enough to use it. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
In some ways, blogging is like drinking - it gives a person permission to be a total asshole. -- Augusten Burroughs
We're all going to die eventually so why not have some fun. -- Augusten Burroughs
She was a rare psychotic-confessional-poet strain of salmonella. -- Augusten Burroughs
It's not that I was an outright nitwit of a child. -- Augusten Burroughs
And she's a nurse. do you know how hard nursing school is? it's like medical school. so she's obviously smart. -- Augusten Burroughs
You know, American alcoholics are pretty fucking hard to insult. -- Augusten Burroughs
The most valuable moments and experiences that life has to offer are found only along its most treacherous paths. -- Augusten Burroughs
It was so extraordinarily out of the ordinary. -- Augusten Burroughs
Trying is not the same as being. Trying flies in a circle around the moment and *being* is inside of it. -- Augusten Burroughs
I will please shut the hell up the day you please drop the hell dead -- Augusten Burroughs
Like somebody who was just happy because there was macaroni and cheese in the world. -- Augusten Burroughs
Perfectionism is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If -- Augusten Burroughs
Imperfections are attractive when their owners are happy with them. -- Augusten Burroughs
You have an incredible body. He reaches out to touch my stomach. I feel no pleasure in his compliment or his touch, only impatience. This is the only feeling. I feel like the paper on which my mood chart is printed. -- 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
There's not enough of me left over. -- Augusten Burroughs
We tried to everything right, now we were forced to do everything wrong and it was working. -- Augusten Burroughs
Give that mint Milano back, you bitch. If you can't at least be polite, you don't get a treat. -- Augusten Burroughs
Where there is nothing, absolutely anything is possible. -- Augusten Burroughs
When you have a blueprint for what happiness is, lay it over your life and see what you need to change so the images are more aligned. -- Augusten Burroughs
Dutch isn't easy for the outsider to learn, because it's spoken from the back of the throat at the trigger spot for the gag reflex. -- Augusten Burroughs
Loss creates a greater overall surface area within a person. You expand as a result of it. Though it may very well feel like the opposite. -- Augusten Burroughs
It was a salad bar of phobias -- Augusten Burroughs
Pissed-off people need back rubs and they also need gym memberships. -- Augusten Burroughs
I'm a sunflower with a cracked petal. -- Augusten Burroughs
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 -- Augusten Burroughs
Well, you know, just some old man all alone. God, I hope I don't end up alone like that. Some pathetic old woman with nobody to go on a whale watch with. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
I tend to really enjoy being swept up in fiction. I love a good story and I admire fiction authors. -- Augusten Burroughs
Like cubic zirconia, I only look real. I'm an imposter. The fact is, I am not like other people. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
Normal people hadn't been molested or reared by a clinically psychotic mother, an alcoholic father, or a perversely mad psychiatrist who wore a Santa hat and performed toilet bowl readings. These were normal people, and I lived among them now. I thought, This must be what I want. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
If I were a serial killer, I would not be the kind that stabs and then eats the victim. I would be the kind that hides in a tree and shoots at the aerobics class. -- Augusten Burroughs
You only need willpower to get what you don't want or you only want to want. By want to want, I mean, something you wish you wanted. But don't really. If -- 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
And in my mind, this settles the issue. I would never drink cologne, and am therefore not an alcoholic. -- Augusten Burroughs
I would borrow the microphone and stuff it down the front of my pants, examining myself from every angle in the mirror -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
I sat up and my mouth tasted horrible, like stale pot, beer and Cheetos. The exact combination of ingredients that had caused me to pass into unconsciousness on Natalie's floor. -- Augusten Burroughs
There's never a false note in a Berg novel. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
For me it provided a kaleidoscopic view of everything that was wrong with me. I could already feel it opening all the windows in my hear, giving me a panoramic view of my flaws -- Augusten Burroughs
I hate news and information and anything that threatens to puncture the bubble of oblivion in which I live. -- Augusten Burroughs
I don't think it's any more deceptive than wearing four-inch come-fuck-me pumps when one has no intention of ever fucking anybody. -- Augusten Burroughs
I don't really think of my blog as a real blog. It's a lame blog. It's more like my when-the-mood-strikes update, or smoke signal. -- Augusten Burroughs
I don't sit down at nine in the morning and begin writing and then take a break for lunch and stop at four. I have no structure like that. I am at my computer constantly, more or less attached to it. I live on-line and hate being off-line and don't care how unhealthy it is. -- Augusten Burroughs
If willpower is required to achieve this goal, that's how you know you don't want it enough on a deep, organic level. Mechanical -- 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
When you say, "I need more confidence," what you're really saying is, "I need those people over there to approve of me."
That is the desire to control other people and what they think. The first person who figures out how to do this owns the world. -- Augusten Burroughs
I don't read memoirs. But if you write a memoir, I would think you'd want people to know, "O.K., look, I've taken some liberties here." It's just a matter of being open with your readers. -- Augusten Burroughs
Memorization is not the same as remembering. -- Augusten Burroughs
I never listen to music when I write. -- Augusten Burroughs
Nobody's trying to kill you, Deirdre. You're killing yourself. -- Augusten Burroughs
There just didn't seem to be anything to hold on to. We weren't going anywhere, and we weren't pulling away. We were just floating, suspended in liquid. And I guess I want more. And I don't know what he wants. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
The year I snuck an interracial lesbian couple into the background of an American Airlines commercial, I was feeling particularly flush. -- Augusten Burroughs
I was struck with a bolt of distilled horror like I have never known before. Far worse than suddenly finding yourself walking through a prison cafeteria wearing Daisy Duke shorts and a Jane Fonda headband. -- Augusten Burroughs
In AA, you are brainwashed into believing that all the good stuff happens only after you stop drinking. Clearly they are lying; my life improved significantly as soon as I ordered a cocktail. -- 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
Only by embracing all that you regret and not denying it, only by placing the highest value on what you've gained because of all you've lost, does regret lose the ability to cripple you. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
All children should be loved, protected, nurtured
emotionally and intellectually
respected, and never, under any circumstances, underestimated. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- 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
New York City is a place where you can lock yourself up in your little studio apartment, and not go outside at all, and not feel in the slightest guilty about it. -- Augusten Burroughs
I thought, This is how it feels inside the right decision. -- Augusten Burroughs
I think you're healthy in certain ways, and I think you're a pathetic disaster in others. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
It's neat how money smells nothing like anything in the world except money, just like cardboard. -- Augusten Burroughs
It's not such a huge deal when this happens at a 7-Eleven. It's pretty huge, though, when you spend the entire job interview trying not to come across like a box of hair and you come across like a box of hair. -- Augusten Burroughs
Didn't every new thing you did become a part of you, one of your bricks? -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
The best person you can be is the person you are when you are alone on a random Thursday. That's who you are. -- Augusten Burroughs
I nodded again, but I knew I would not grow up to drive a bulldozer. It would be awful to be dirty all day like these men. I didn't say it, but at best I would keep one in the backyard, like a goat. -- Augusten Burroughs
I saw a monkey walking on a leash and thought it was an ugly foreign child. -- Augusten Burroughs
People believe in god because they can't think to be alone. -- Augusten Burroughs
My window fogs and this makes me feel like there is no world outside of the car. -- Augusten Burroughs
This is what happens when you go against the grain of truth: you get splinters later on. -- Augusten Burroughs
Nothing worth having comes easy. -- Augusten Burroughs
I realized I could really become hooked on these happy pills. They gave me a glorious feeling of general well-being and didn't make me fat, like alcohol. I wondered if there was any harm in being addicted to only these. -- Augusten Burroughs
I hate when you play therapist. Especially with your accent. It makes everything you say sound so BBC. -- Augusten Burroughs
But I think I would have been happier if the only thing that came out of his mouth was the sound of a turning page. -- Augusten Burroughs
A tear wells in his eye. It wells and then spills down his cheek. And despite being pumped with booze and coke, I can read that one eye as clearly as a billboard for cigarettes. Only instead of saying Alive with Pleasure it says, I Have to Go Now. -- Augusten Burroughs
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 it doesn't fit you. -- Augusten Burroughs
I had never before considered the possibility that I might never even want a drink yet still be left with this horrible, throbbing vacancy in the center of my being, right where my mental health and contentment were supposed to be. -- Augusten Burroughs
You know, sometimes just giving yourself permission to feel any emotion without judgment or censorship can lessen the intensity of those negative emotions. -- Augusten Burroughs
Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the wax -- 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
To be more confident you need to give a whole lot less of a shit about that other people think of you. -- Augusten Burroughs
Once I decided to write, to be published, I knew it would happen. -- Augusten Burroughs
I understood that I was clearly insane. But he apparently hadn't picked up on how many times in one short letter I asserted that I was not. This acceptance of my questionable mental health made me feel confident that we would be compatible, possibly for life. I -- Augusten Burroughs
Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when. -- Augusten Burroughs
Now I can add prostitute to my list of life's accomplishments. -- 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
Part of me felt deep compassion. And another part felt like, You fucker. -- Augusten Burroughs
Olives are the wishbones of the cocktail world; rarely are they freely passed along to somebody else. -- Augusten Burroughs
Six hours later, when I returned, I was greeted at the door- and this before it was even opened -by the overpowering smell of vinegar. What were my neighbors thinking? That a douche-obsessed woman with a gigantic, three-foot vagina lived next door? -- Augusten Burroughs
My subconscious does the writing; I don't have control over that. -- Augusten Burroughs
We haven't slept together. But we've napped -- Augusten Burroughs
Marriage is overdone. As long as there are people, people are going to find it interesting. -- 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
I had the same worry that we wouldn't later be able to undo whatever it was we were doing to ourselves. -- Augusten Burroughs
Now he was the dish of wrapped peppermints next to the cash register that I didn't want because they were free. Because -- Augusten Burroughs
[My brother] shaped my young life. First, he taught me how to walk. Then, armed with sticks and dead snakes, he chased me and I learned how to run. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
Augusten very distant tonight. Probably because of my games. -- Augusten Burroughs
I hate feelings. Why does sobriety have to come with feelings? -- Augusten Burroughs
My only ritual is to just sit down and write, write every day. -- Augusten Burroughs
If you're gay and live in New York and don't go to gym, eventually they come for you. -- Augusten Burroughs
There is helium in his tone of voice, a lightness that means mischief. -- Augusten Burroughs
I'm tired of living in the shallow end of the pool. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions. -- Augusten Burroughs
Even though I am wary of Nature. After all, where do most manhunts for escaped serial killers begin? Exactly. In the woods. -- Augusten Burroughs
Your mind is like an unsafe neighborhood; don't go there alone. -- Augusten Burroughs
Love is a helium-based emotion; Love always takes the high road. -- Augusten Burroughs
When you have your health, you have everything. When you do not have your health, nothing else matters at all. -- Augusten Burroughs
My attraction had been immediate and profound. And it had nothing to do with the way he looked. My attraction was to what resided between his lines. -- Augusten Burroughs
How could something have no end, and if it had no end exactly where did it leave us? -- Augusten Burroughs
If you hate 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. -- 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
Signs with missing letters can only mean bad things. -- Augusten Burroughs
He likes people because he likes to share in conversations. I like people when they have large checks for me. -- Augusten Burroughs
SEEING THE TRUTH MEANS looking at everything for the first time, every time. -- Augusten Burroughs
We did not pass one other Mercury Merkur XR4Ti the entire way. -- Augusten Burroughs
If you don't like smoking don't even bother getting sober, just stay drunk. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
No matter how awful something is, you can always sell tickets. -- Augusten Burroughs
Riding back from the grocery store, I realized my father was two men - one he presented to the outside world, and one, far darker, that was always there, behind the face everybody else saw. In my bedroom late that -- Augusten Burroughs
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
I wish Rick would be gang-raped by a bunch of Muslim garbage collectors. -- Augusten Burroughs
It's weird - sort of not terribly wise - to take a book that was successful and then change its cover. -- 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
Bookman isn't a stable man. He has a lot of problems that run very, very deep.
But he was really good at giving head. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
In spouse, I mostly hear "S.mouse," the name of Chris Lilley's blackface teenage rapper in Angry Boys. And -- 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
I was like a packet of powdered Sea Monkeys and they were like water. -- Augusten Burroughs
Decisions are beautiful. They are the evidence of thought and care. Decisions are the polishing cloths of life. -- Augusten Burroughs
Adam had smiled at him and Max had smiled back. And then they both just stood there in that awkward silence that happens when two people are attracted to each other but don't know what to do about it because they are strangers. -- 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
I just had way too much energy for six A.M. Too much motivation. It was like the drunk side of my brain was trying to act distracting and entertaining, so the business side wouldn't realize it was being held hostage by a drunk. I -- Augusten Burroughs
It terrified me to consider: What if, as a grown-up, I craved another body beside me as still as this one? What then? -- Augusten Burroughs
My goal was to get through the day as fast as possible. I worked fast because I wanted to be done. I wanted to be done because I wanted to go home to my nest and drink. -- Augusten Burroughs
It wasn't like he was holding me so much as trying to hold onto something. -- Augusten Burroughs
A lot of being a writer doesn't have anything to do with writing. It's ironic - I have to squeeze the books in, even though that's what it's all about. -- Augusten Burroughs
What is lint? How does it find hair dryers and navels? -- Augusten Burroughs
It turned out I had always been a smoker. I just hadn't had any cigarettes. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
Because he will grip you by the shoulders and
wrench you around and he will bring his bristly
mouth to yours and blow
stars
down your throat
until you are so full
of
light -- Augusten Burroughs
Never work with children, puppies or bulimics. -- Augusten Burroughs
I feel like they are two different things, and when I write books, they're just books. If they can be movies that's okay. But I would write a novel that couldn't be a film. -- Augusten Burroughs
So if you think the job really suits you, be you. -- Augusten Burroughs
He's a really nice guy, if only I weren't me. -- Augusten Burroughs
He was raised without a proper diagnosis. -- Augusten Burroughs
I made very good money and spent all of it every week. I lived paycheck to paycheck ... -- Augusten Burroughs
You manufacture beauty with your mind -- Augusten Burroughs
The past doesn't haunt us, we haunt the past. -- Augusten Burroughs
The shame is disguised here as helpful. But both people in this conversation would know it was bullying. -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
I was not living but actively dying. -- Augusten Burroughs
Applause is a constant thing in AA. It's how we buy drinks for each other. -- Augusten Burroughs
I was desperate to show him what I could do on my own. But my father, because he hadn't been there, simply didn't believe what I was actually capable of accomplishing. -- Augusten Burroughs
Doctor, if being a bitch is healthy, then I am the healthiest damn woman on the face of the earth -- Augusten Burroughs
Handsome people are always interesting to watch. But a handsome person in crisis is riveting. -- Augusten Burroughs
I understand why sometimes people speak in cliches because sometimes there is no other way to describe something. -- Augusten Burroughs
Reading takes solitude and it takes focus. -- Augusten Burroughs
Although my parents never attended church or mentioned Jesus except when they screamed at each other - and then they used his full name, 'Jesus Fucking Christ -- Augusten Burroughs
If i wasn't an accident mustn't I be a crushing disappointment? -- 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
The more obsessed one is with getting thin, the more certain it becomes that one will never get there. -- Augusten Burroughs
What you've written isn't a novel. It's a cry for help. I -- Augusten Burroughs
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. -- Augusten Burroughs
As charming as the room was, I knew it wouldn't work for me. I do not need charming. I need to be online, at all times. I need surge protection. -- 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
