Top 350 Augusten Burroughs Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “My thoughts seem thick, ketchup stuck in a bottle. Like trying to feel someone’s face while wearing goosedown mittens.”

— Augusten Burroughs

52. “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

53. “People generally like happy endings, which is something I learned from my years in advertising. I like happy endings myself, but only if they’re honest. I’m just as happy with a terrible, hopeless ending.”

— Augusten Burroughs

54. “All of us are richer and more fascinating and more complex than we can ever know.”

— Augusten Burroughs

55. “To live in regret and change nothing else in your life is to miss the entire point.”

— Augusten Burroughs

56. “You see, even though back when I was drinking I thought nothing bad ever happened to me, something did. Time passed. A lot of time passed. In bars, at parties with people I didn’t care for. It was always the drink. It wasn’t about love or reading the Sunday paper in bed. Or housebreaking a puppy. Or anything that people call ‘life.’ It was about drinking. So actually, something bad, very bad, did happen to me. I wasted my life. And now, what little I have left, I want.”

— Augusten Burroughs

57. “What is lint? How does it find hair dryers and navels?”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

59. “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

60. “He smiled like a cat with fresh chipmunk blood on his whiskers.”

— Augusten Burroughs

61. “This is what happens when you go against the grain of truth. You get splinters later on.”

— Augusten Burroughs

62. “This is the truest thing I know. Scars are nothing to hate, they are nothing to deny. They serve as our proof of what we survived, and there is nothing more beautiful than to have survived something.”

— Augusten Burroughs

63. “Decisions are beautiful. They are the evidence of thought and care. Decisions are the polishing cloths of life.”

— Augusten Burroughs

64. “My attraction had been immediate and profound. And it had nothing to do with the way he looked. My attraction was to what resided between his lines.”

— Augusten Burroughs

65. “Childhood is what ended me up in the hospital and teetering on the edge of deathly alcoholism. It was really good for me to accept it. To accept all the embarrassment and the shame so I don’t feel like I used to.”

— Augusten Burroughs

66. “Saying just the right thing after a considerable, awkward pause is far less effective than saying the wrong thing with perfect timing. I’m telling you.”

— Augusten Burroughs

67. “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

68. “I can’t tell you how much I love Target and Costco, that kind of culture, because it’s something I never felt a part of. I’ve always felt like a tourist because I have never fit in anywhere.”

— Augusten Burroughs

69. “This is what you should know about losing someone you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.”

— Augusten Burroughs

70. “The past doesn’t haunt us, we haunt the past.”

— Augusten Burroughs

71. “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

72. “You deserve to need me, not to have me.”

— Augusten Burroughs

73. “After was better. Before was only there so After could happen.”

— Augusten Burroughs

74. “Do not wait for the healing to arrive. It will never come. The holes will never leave or be filled with anything at all. But holes are interesting things.”

— Augusten Burroughs

75. “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

76. “Even when we lose an arm or a leg, there’s not less of us but more. Human experience weighs more than human tissue.”

— Augusten Burroughs

77. “If you find you require willpower, you aren’t ready to lose weight.”

— Augusten Burroughs

78. “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 sandwhich, I am God’ sort of way.”

— Augusten Burroughs

79. “His laugh is made if porch swings and lemonade.”

— Augusten Burroughs

80. “My brother was born without taste or the desire to be professionally lit.”

— Augusten Burroughs

81. “Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

83. “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

84. “Shame is the landfill emotion. It’s not organic, like joy. It was dumped there by somebody else.”

— Augusten Burroughs

85. “And in my mind, this settles the issue. I would never drink cologne, and am therefore not an alcoholic.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

87. “It was a salad bar of phobias.”

— Augusten Burroughs

88. “I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness.”

— Augusten Burroughs

89. “I felt ignorant, self-deprived, incredibly isolated, deeply and profoundly lonely and missing people, absolutely starved for affection, physically weary from alcohol, very depressed about my physical appearance, my weak muscles. Hurt and angry and sad.”

— Augusten Burroughs

90. “What police officer would dare ticket Death’s minivan?”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

92. “I feel like they are two different things, and when I write books, they’re just books. If they can be movies that’s okay. But I would write a novel that couldn’t be a film.”

— Augusten Burroughs

93. “As a child, I was never drawn toward depraved or extreme situations; I really wanted a normal little childhood. Unfortunately, that’s just not what happened.”

— Augusten Burroughs

94. “The person who loses their ability to walk will care more about the brownies than about the walking. Because if they have lost the ability to walk, they have accepted the loss. Walking was then, brownies are now. You would be amazed by what you can give up, lose, or break and yet still be a person who gets happy over brownies. It only seems like I am kidding.”

— Augusten Burroughs

95. “So that’s what I’m here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven’t felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green.”

— Augusten Burroughs

96. “New York City is a place where you can lock yourself up in your little studio apartment, and not go outside at all, and not feel in the slightest guilty about it.”

— Augusten Burroughs

97. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

99. “My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs