Augusten Burroughs - Running with Scissors (2002)

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Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity.

Augusten Burroughs
After was better. Before was only there so After could 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
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 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 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
My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron.

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

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

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

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
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
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
I will please shut the hell up the day you please drop the hell dead.

Augusten Burroughs
My brother was born without taste or the desire to be professionally lit.

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 sandwich, I am God' sort of way.

Augusten Burroughs
My window fogs and this makes me feel like there is no world outside of the car.

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
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
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
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
Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when.

Augusten Burroughs
I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness.

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
It turned out I had always been a smoker. I just hadn't had any cigarettes.

Augusten Burroughs