Top 350 Augusten Burroughs Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.”

— Augusten Burroughs

2. “When you have your health, you have everything. When you do not have your health, nothing else matters at all.”

— Augusten Burroughs

3. “I’m always prepared for the worst.”

— Augusten Burroughs

4. “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

5. “The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.”

— Augusten Burroughs

6. “All children should be loved, protected, nurtured – emotionally and intellectually – respected, and never, under any circumstances, underestimated.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

8. “Nothing worth having comes easy” is not about showing up early at the office. It’s about showing up in your own life. And living inside the very moment you want to run away from.”

— Augusten Burroughs

9. “I read a lot of science books – I love cosmology, quantum theory, particle physics. So my idea of a great read would probably put you directly into a coma.”

— Augusten Burroughs

10. “I like, though, that people have a hunger to connect with other people. They’re desperate to know that you’re not lying to them or misleading them.”

— Augusten Burroughs

11. “And I hope she does not live in a dark world. Because even the most terrible loss doesn’t have to make you darker; it can make you deeper.”

— Augusten Burroughs

12. “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

13. “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

Featured in: Goodbye Quotes

14. “Think of your head as an unsafe neighborhood; don’t go there alone.”

— Augusten Burroughs

15. “You need to grab your dream out of the sky like it’s a kite and pinch the string through your fingers until you reach the spool.”

— Augusten Burroughs

16. “Like cubic zirconia, I only look real. I’m an imposter. The fact is, I am not like other people.”

— Augusten Burroughs

17. “Stars should not be seen alone. That’s why there are so many. Two people should stand together and look at them. One person alone will surely miss the good ones.”

— Augusten Burroughs

18. “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

19. “The most valuable moments and experiences that life has to offer are found only along its most treacherous paths.”

— Augusten Burroughs

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “I suppose home is, for me, more of a state of mind. It’s really more of about being where I want to be with people I care about.”

— Augusten Burroughs

24. “You would be amazed by what you can give up, lose, or break, and yet still be a person who gets happy over brownies.”

— Augusten Burroughs

25. “Love is a helium-based emotion; Love always takes the high road.”

— Augusten Burroughs

26. “You manufacture beauty with your mind.”

— Augusten Burroughs

27. “Part of me believes that love is more valuable when you have to work for it.”

— Augusten Burroughs

28. “To stop drinking, all you have to do is sit. In 100 percent of the documented cases of alcoholism worldwide, the people who recovered all shared one thing in common, no matter how they did it: They didn’t do it.”

— Augusten Burroughs

29. “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.”

— Augusten Burroughs

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “I hate feelings. Why does sobriety have to come with feelings?”

— Augusten Burroughs

34. “Perfection is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If you are a perfectionist, at least stop telling everybody you’re one and try to get over it yourself, alone in your home with the lights off.”

— Augusten Burroughs

35. “If I were blind I’d rather have another blind person leading me around because they know what I’m dealing with and they’re experiencing the same things.”

— Augusten Burroughs

36. “Nobody’s trying to kill you, Deirdre. You’re killing yourself.”

— Augusten Burroughs

37. “Imperfections are attractive when their owners are happy with them.”

— Augusten Burroughs

38. “I don’t have a fixed routine. I write every day but I don’t “write” every day, if that makes any sense. In other words, I email with my friends constantly and sometimes I’ll pull out something I’ve written and save it.”

— Augusten Burroughs

39. “Red hair is great. It’s rare, and therefore superior.”

— Augusten Burroughs

40. “The truth is humbling, terrifying, and often exhilarating. It blows the doors off the hinges and fills the world with fresh air.”

— Augusten Burroughs

41. “Real optimism is not the pep talk you give yourself. It is earned through the labor involved in emotional housekeeping.”

— Augusten Burroughs

42. “You can make almost anything a learning or positive experience. I think I offer a good example of how to make the most out of what life gives you and how to keep moving on.”

— Augusten Burroughs

43. “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

44. “What nobody understood then is this: The only way that you achieve what you want and fulfill your dreams and become great is by demanding that sort of attention. You have to make it happen.”

— Augusten Burroughs

45. “You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.”

— Augusten Burroughs

46. “I’ve learned how to turn the adversities in my life into enriching experiences. You can actually gain a lot from adversities and they make you the person you are today.”

— Augusten Burroughs

47. “And human instinct is ancient and reliable, utterly mysterious and possibly capable of great genius. I believe that refined, fluent instincts are a person’s most valuable asset. My own instincts have repeatedly guided me against the grain of logic and probability. When I have trusted and followed their direction, they have never been wrong. I don’t know how or why. But I know that every significant experience-positive or negative-sharpens them and makes them more accurate.”

— Augusten Burroughs

48. “I came to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren’t alone. Maybe God was simply that part of yourself that was always there and always strong, even when you were not.”

— Augusten Burroughs

Featured in: Strong Quotes

49. “I remember, no matter how impossible it seemed that any given day would end, it always did. This one would, too.”

— Augusten Burroughs

50. “The calcium in your bones came from a star. We are all made from recycle bits and pieces of the universe. This matters because origins matter.”

— Augusten Burroughs