Top 350 Augusten Burroughs Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

53. “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

54. “My thoughts seem thick, ketchup stuck in a bottle. Like trying to feel someone’s face while wearing goosedown mittens.”

— Augusten Burroughs

55. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

57. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

60. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

62. “Where there is nothing, absolutely anything is possible.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

64. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

73. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

76. “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

77. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

79. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

83. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

85. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

87. “It was a salad bar of phobias.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

99. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs