Augusten Burroughs Quotes

122 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
Miracles do happen. You must believe this. No matter what else you believe about life, you must believe in miracles.

Augusten Burroughs
After was better. Before was only there so After could happen.

Augusten Burroughs
This is what happens when you go against the grain of truth. You get splinters later on.

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
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
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
The more obsessed one is with getting thin, the more certain it becomes that one will never get there.

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
Are you one of those people who says on a first date, 'I'm really not in a hurry to meet somebody, I figure if it happens, it happens'? Because those are the most desperate people of all. I'm just saying this so that if you are this person, you aren't hiding it from anybody. There is no shame in being hungry for another person. There is no shame in wanting very much to share your life with somebody.

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 saw a monkey walking on a leash and thought it was an ugly foreign child.

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
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
While I liked hamsters, too, the Habitrail cage was expensive. Even I could see that the interconnecting boxes, tubes, and spheres could easily bankrupt a family and lead to addiction later in life. Because, how would you know when to stop? How could you stop? An entire city could be built with a Habitrail.

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

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

Augusten Burroughs
No matter how huge your loss, as long as you remain engaged with your life, the best days of your life may still be ahead of you. Don't misunderstand me: the pain of your loss will remain with you for the rest of your life. But great joy will be there right beside it. Deep sorrow and deep joy can exist within you, side by side. At every moment. And it's not confusing. And it's not a conflict.

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

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
I told myself, 'All I want is a normal life'. But was that true? I wasn't so sure. Because there was a part of me that enjoyed hating school, and the drama of not going, the potential consequences whatever they were. I was intrigued by the unknown. I was even slightly thrilled that my mother was such a mess. Had I become addicted to crisis?

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
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
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
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
Even painfully shy and awkward people are not painfully shy or awkward when they are alone. The way to access this natural, comfortable alone-self when you are with others is by choosing to forbid yourself to wonder what "they" are thinking. Instead, force yourself to exist in the instant, then take it- and give it- as it comes.

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

Augusten Burroughs