Augusten Burroughs Quotes

122 Sourced Quotes

The most mortifying fact of my life is something that happened when I was fourteen and I have never admitted to anyone: not to friends nor therapists; not even in rehab when we were detailing our own personal spirals of shame did I confess. It is this: I am a graduate of the Barbizon School of Modeling.

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

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
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 don't believe in the concept of a soul mate. Because we are all unique, but we're also simply too similar.

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 was like a packet of powdered Sea Monkeys and they were like water.

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

Augusten Burroughs
When you have your health, you have everything. When you do not have your health, nothing else matters at all.

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
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
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
It was unnerving, the way she could go from cool efficiency to sarcastic to sweet within the space of thirty seconds. I found it very manipulative and controlling. It put the other person constantly on-guard. And it was extremely intimidating because you never knew when she was going to snap. I made a mental note to refine these skills within myself.

Augusten Burroughs
If you believe suicide will bring you peace, or at the very least just an end to everything you hate- you are displaying self-caring behavior. You are still able to actively seek solutions to your problems. You are willing to go to great lengths to provide what you believe will be soothing to yourself. This strikes me as optimistic.

Augusten Burroughs
I think part of the reason I'm attracted to Foster is because he's such a mess. I mean, the people I have loved in my life have never been easy to love. I'm not used to normal. I'm used to disaster. I don't know, as messed up as he is, he's also sort of exciting, sort of a challenge. I'm accustomed to working for love.

Augusten Burroughs
No matter your spiritual beliefs, if you hold any, the answer is the same: sometimes, why is not knowable. If you open the refrigerator door and a tub of Kozy Shack tapioca pudding tumbles out and splats open onto the floor, you clean it. You don't stand there and question why it happened, how it was possible. Why doesn't matter now.

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
I want to study astrophysics and cosmology. But I don't know math. And when I say I don't know math, I don't even know division.

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
Confidence is a reduction of your own interest in whether others are thinking about you and if so, what they're thinking.

Augusten Burroughs
The most valuable moments and experiences that life has to offer are found only along its most treacherous paths.

Augusten Burroughs
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
Nobody's trying to kill you, Deirdre. You're killing yourself.

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
Imperfections are attractive when their owners are happy with them.

Augusten Burroughs
Applause is a constant thing in AA. It's how we buy drinks for each other.

Augusten Burroughs
My sense of humor is really nothing more than a flashy defense mechanism.

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