Augusten Burroughs - Life Quotes

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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.

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
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
Optimism sprouts from the knowledge that you are in control of your own life, not your past and not those around you. Part of being in control is taking responsibility for how you feel. This means not just admitting to uncomfortable feelings but then examining your circumstances to see what can be done to change these feelings at the source.

Augusten Burroughs
Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal.

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

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

Augusten Burroughs