Top 350 Augusten Burroughs Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I think I love him, but I also think that you can love people who aren’t good for you.”

— Augusten Burroughs

102. “There is nothing about MYSELF that I wouldn’t reveal or write about. I don’t care how horrendous or ridiculous I may appear in person or in print. There is great freedom in not caring what other people think.”

— Augusten Burroughs

103. “When people meet me, many times they’re very surprised because they expect someone who is kind of wacky with seven piercings and very hip and cool and New York City, and I’m not.”

— Augusten Burroughs

104. “I could write another collection of personal essays from what has happened to me in the last year alone. I don’t seek out my material – it finds me. I am magnetic, somehow.”

— Augusten Burroughs

105. “There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that’s life or a scene in a novel. What’s interesting to people, whether it’s memoir or fiction, is the truth.”

— Augusten Burroughs

106. “Books are like that. Books just are. Sometimes books need to be, they need to exist and so they will body-snatch a writer and climb out through the writer’s fingers and into the world where they belong to different people to different degrees and for different reasons. I.”

— Augusten Burroughs

107. “There’s never a false note in a Berg novel.”

— Augusten Burroughs

108. “And of course, the answer came to me in the same way Jesus comes to those who drink in trailers: as an epiphany.”

— Augusten Burroughs

109. “I’ve just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I’m now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

111. “Bad news should be followed with soup. Then a nap.”

— Augusten Burroughs

112. “I know now: what is is all that matters. Not the thing you know is meant to be, not what could be, not what should be, not what ought to be, not what once was. Only the is.”

— Augusten Burroughs

113. “This is among the oldest, deepest, most primal truths: the facts of life may be, at times, unbearably painful. But the core, the bones of life are generous beyond all reason or belief. Those things that ought to kill us do not.”

— Augusten Burroughs

114. “You should know, I tried for many years not to be in love with you, but I failed. And I really did try very hard. But it was not possible, and it never has been, because I have actually loved you from very early in our relationship. Possibly as early as our first meeting.”

— Augusten Burroughs

115. “That is self-pity and it is dangerous because it signals a lack of accountability for one’s mental state and, worse, the outcome of one’s life.”

— Augusten Burroughs

116. “I don’t think writers -in general- ever achieve the fame of movie stars. For the simple reason that only a fraction of the population reads. But I guess there are exceptions.”

— Augusten Burroughs

117. “When I first thought of being a writer I had visions of stacks of books in stores with my name on them, that sort of thing. But I never imagined this would be the reaction.”

— Augusten Burroughs

118. “Thanksgiving was nothing more than a pilgrim-created obstacle in the way of Christmas; a dead bird in the street that forced a brief detour.”

— Augusten Burroughs

119. “Dutch isn’t easy for the outsider to learn, because it’s spoken from the back of the throat at the trigger spot for the gag reflex. In order to make the correct sounds, you have to have quite a bit of phlegm at the ready, which is probably why everybody smokes. Nonsmokers can’t even understand Dutch, let alone speak a single word of it. The.”

— Augusten Burroughs

120. “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

121. “I saw a monkey walking on a leash and thought it was an ugly foreign child.”

— Augusten Burroughs

122. “I read The Old Man and the Sea but my eyelids bled from the toothpicks that I used to keep them open.”

— Augusten Burroughs

123. “I never get sick of writing my own stories because there’s a certain comfort in knowing you will never run out of material. It’s relaxing, actually, to write.”

— Augusten Burroughs

124. “The shame is disguised here as helpful. But both people in this conversation would know it was bullying.”

— Augusten Burroughs

125. “If you hate your life, you haven’t’ seen enough of it. If you hate your life, it’s because your life is too small and doesn’t’ fit you.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

127. “I realized I could really become hooked on these happy pills. They gave me a glorious feeling of general well-being and didn’t make me fat, like alcohol. I wondered if there was any harm in being addicted to only these.”

— Augusten Burroughs

128. “Nothing made sense to me anymore. I knew I was young, I knew I was small. But I was worried that I might already be ruined.”

— Augusten Burroughs

129. “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

130. “I don’t believe in the concept of a soul mate. Because we are all unique, but we’re also simply too similar.”

— Augusten Burroughs

131. “Never work with children, puppies or bulimics.”

— Augusten Burroughs

132. “I am prone to envy. It is one of my three default emotions, the others being greed and rage. I have also experienced compassion and generosity, but only fleetingly and usually while drunk, so I have little memory.”

— Augusten Burroughs

133. “Long marriages have ended in ruin over tiny and insignificant grievances that were never properly aired and instead grew into a brittle barnacle of hatred.”

— Augusten Burroughs

134. “It was like living in a new house. I saw the undersides of tables, walked through the tangle of chair legs. It would be good to be a dog, I thought. You would feel safe surrounded by all of these leggy objects that never tried to run away.”

— Augusten Burroughs

135. “The unfairness of your current status is unimportant. What matters is, can you do what you need to do? If.”

— Augusten Burroughs

136. “Signs with missing letters can only mean bad things.”

— Augusten Burroughs

137. “My subconscious does the writing; I don’t have control over that.”

— Augusten Burroughs

138. “The truth behind the truth is this: even if you are a victim, you must never be a victim. Even if you deserve to be one. Because while you wait for somebody to come along and set things right, life has moved forward without you.”

— Augusten Burroughs

139. “My only ritual is to just sit down and write, write every day.”

— Augusten Burroughs

140. “In AA, you are brainwashed into believing that all the good stuff happens only after you stop drinking. Clearly they are lying; my life improved significantly as soon as I ordered a cocktail.”

— Augusten Burroughs

141. “Truthfulness itself is almost medication, even when it’s served without advice or insight.”

— Augusten Burroughs

142. “We haven’t slept together. But we’ve napped.”

— Augusten Burroughs

143. “I thought, I can’t do advertising any more, so I was downloading all these PDF applications from community colleges. And I thought, I’ll become a paramedic. I’ll get a two-year associate degree, if I can get in.”

— Augusten Burroughs

144. “There is a complexity to life that I often overlook. There is a depth of thinking, there is a richness. I am skating on the surface.”

— Augusten Burroughs

145. “Dennis is the person who organizes everything in our lives. To the casual outsider, it would seem grossly unfair. He owns a company, he handles all our money, he manages our lives. While I sit and write, Dennis does everything else. When I try to accept additional responsibilities, I make a mess and he has to fix whatever I broke.”

— Augusten Burroughs

146. “Pain is interesting. I dislike it immensely but I’ve never experienced pain and boredom at the same time. Even when I had unending and severe pain in my lower back for several years I was never bored by the pain, though it exhausted me.”

— Augusten Burroughs

147. “A lack of “self-esteem” really suggests a feeling of shame over being one’s self. Shame is the landfill emotion. It’s not organic, like joy. It was dumped there by somebody else. A manipulation. Shame is very heavy, dense disappointment; somebody else’s, in you. Inside of disappointment is a deeper judgment: Less than. Inferior. Defective.”

— Augusten Burroughs

148. “Just as I had long suspected, a person didn’t really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people.”

— Augusten Burroughs

149. “My window fogs and this makes me feel like there is no world outside of the car.”

— Augusten Burroughs

150. “Throwing things horrified me. I suffered extreme, paralyzing anxiety when it came to anything remotely athletic. I wouldn’t even run to catch the school bus because I knew I’d trip and then get teased for a year.”

— Augusten Burroughs