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Augusten Burroughs Quotes
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You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.
Augusten Burroughs
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Just as I had long suspected, a person didn't really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people.
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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.
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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.
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Glen had a disability more disfiguring than a burn and more terrifying than cancer. Glen had been born on the day after Christmas. "My parents just combine my birthday with Christmas, that's all," he explained. But we knew this was a lie. Glen's parents just wrapped a couple of his Christmas presents in birthday-themed wrapping paper, stuck some candles in a supermarket cake, and had a dinner of Christmas leftovers.
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Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal.
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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.
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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.
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Everybody in recovery smokes. If you don't like smoking, don't even bother trying to get sober. Just stay drunk.
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Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.
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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.
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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.
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I don't believe in the concept of a soul mate. Because we are all unique, but we're also simply too similar.
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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.
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I was like a packet of powdered Sea Monkeys and they were like water.
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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.
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I hate news and information and anything that threatens to puncture the bubble of oblivion in which I live.
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When you have your health, you have everything. When you do not have your health, nothing else matters at all.
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We were young. We were bored. And the old electroshock therapy machine was just under the stairs in a box next to the Hoover.
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The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin. A person would have to be an expert tightrope walker in order not to fall.
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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.
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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
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Quote of the day
The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Augusten Burroughs
Creative Commons
Born:
October 23, 1965
(age 58)
Bio:
Augusten Xon Burroughs is an American writer known for his New York Times bestselling memoir Running with Scissors.
Known for:
Running with Scissors (2002)
A Wolf at the Table (2008)
Magical Thinking (2004)
Possible Side Effects (2006)
Most used words:
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life
love
feel
person
alone
answer
normal
god
matter
mother
school
felt
loss
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