Top 350 Augusten Burroughs Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “When you’re busy, you lack the time to fondle your emotional baggage. And if that sounds too reductive, remember we crawled from the swamp. Simple isn’t such a terrible thing to be in this respect.”

— Augusten Burroughs

152. “In fact, you can be a very honest person and yet not be living a truthful life. And not even realize it. This matters because stripping away all the inaccuracies, misunderstandings, and untruths that surround you is exactly how you can overcome anything at all. Truth is accuracy. Without accuracy, you can’t expect to manifest large, specific changes in your life.”

— Augusten Burroughs

153. “Once I decided to write, to be published, I knew it would happen.”

— Augusten Burroughs

154. “I don’t really think of my blog as a real blog. It’s a lame blog. It’s more like my when-the-mood-strikes update, or smoke signal.”

— Augusten Burroughs

155. “Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it. – Jules Renard, 1890.”

— Augusten Burroughs

156. “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

157. “I loved most when his eyelashes twitched and he blinked, and suddenly happiness was there inside his eyes. Unmistakable. Like a single word printed on a clean white page.”

— Augusten Burroughs

158. “Was it a universal truth that the closer you looked at something, the more you would see but the less you would understand what you where looking at?”

— Augusten Burroughs

159. “Only by embracing all that you regret and not denying it, only by placing the highest value on what you’ve gained because of all you’ve lost, does regret lose the ability to cripple you.”

— Augusten Burroughs

160. “I love to both give and receive very old books.”

— Augusten Burroughs

161. “A lot of being a writer doesn’t have anything to do with writing. It’s ironic – I have to squeeze the books in, even though that’s what it’s all about.”

— Augusten Burroughs

162. “I once read about a guy who lost his arms in a fire. The nurse took pity on him and gave him a hand job. I don’t even get that.”

— Augusten Burroughs

163. “I sit there and think how it isn’t fair that I can’t drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinking into a decade of hard-core drinking and that is why. I blew my wad.”

— Augusten Burroughs

164. “But my favorite band is Curbside Life, out of Chicago.”

— Augusten Burroughs

165. “The only other people who have had experiences similar to those of this man were locked up inside institutions for the criminally insane. The difference is, this guy gets business cards.”

— Augusten Burroughs

166. “Because all of us are made not only of what we have but of what we lost. And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition. Even when we lose a leg or an arm, there’s not less of us but more. Human experience weighs more than human tissue.”

— Augusten Burroughs

167. “When strangers saw him cowering and shivering and skittering, they all assumed he’d had a dramatically abusive past. And by “all,” I mean every single person who saw him. Each one felt the need to make sad faces and say, “Awwww, look at how scared he is. He must be a rescue.” I quickly got to the point where I wanted to say, “Actually, no, he’s a purebred, but I beat him.” Thin.”

— Augusten Burroughs

168. “Tracy, the leader of the CDH group, looks at me with eyes that seem to belong to someone three times her age. It’s something beyond wisdom, all the way to insanity and back. It’s like her eyes are scarred from all the things she’s seen.”

— Augusten Burroughs

169. “She was a rare psychotic-confessional-poet strain of salmonella.”

— Augusten Burroughs

170. “Awe, I discovered, was my favorite feeling. It was a rare experience, but when it happened, it was like an orgasm for the mind.”

— Augusten Burroughs

171. “You will either do so convincingly and well, or you won’t. But at least you will be plugged in to the moment in the process. Not flitting just outside of it, trying to keep everything together like one of those little heel-snapping Sheltie dogs.”

— Augusten Burroughs

172. “Dennis asked, “Do you enjoy jazz? Because I love it, and I know of a place downtown where we could go.” “And then we can have broken glass and arsenic for dinner!” I felt like replying, because I barely tolerated jazz when I encountered it in elevators or dental offices. But I considered that when you meet somebody who really loves something, the high-road thing to do is to try to love it, too, so I wrote back, “That sounds great!”

— Augusten Burroughs

173. “Shame is also a covert and effective bullying method. All those bullies from the seventh grade didn’t simply evaporate. They grew up, too, and it’s pretty safe to assume that the majority did not seek therapy on their eighteenth birthday to explore their disturbing childhood need for cruelty.”

— Augusten Burroughs

174. “I could not imagine the kind of person that would, upon seeing a crazy talcum-powder-covered Southern lady think to herself, Hmmmm, she might make a great new friend. The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin.”

— Augusten Burroughs

175. “I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn’t deserve it.”

— Augusten Burroughs

176. “Two hundred tons of ore is a great amount of ore. If, after a reasonable amount of time and effort you remain unhappily single, my suggestion is that you employ the services of a cat or a dog. Both cats and dogs are known hiding places of soul mates. They are also very, very good at getting strangers to talk to them in kind voices. Which, it should be noted, could be of some use to those who might otherwise be too shy to step forward and say, hello.”

— Augusten Burroughs

177. “But I can also write in crappy motel rooms, while standing in line, or sitting in the dentist’s chair.”

— Augusten Burroughs

178. “Like every child, I adored her. Until I formed a brain and got to know her.”

— Augusten Burroughs

179. “Writing has enriched my life in ways I never imaged.”

— Augusten Burroughs

180. “What I like about you is that I’ve never met anybody like you in my life. You’ve got depth and you’re funny and you have a sweet, good soul.” A breeze from the water passes over us, “And I admire your strength.”

— Augusten Burroughs

181. “When you have a blueprint for what happiness is, lay it over your life and see what you need to change so the images are more aligned.”

— Augusten Burroughs

182. “Another quite useful and healthy outlet for anger is writing. Even if you “can’t write.” Because actually, if you can speak, you can write. It’s just a period of adjustment using your fingers instead of your mouth. But if you write – or type – exactly what you’re thinking, without even a single change, when you read it, whatever you wrote will sound like you, talking. That’s writing. No MFA required. Especially if what you’re going to write is a letter.”

— Augusten Burroughs

183. “I wouldn’t want to waste any of my brain cells on forgiving if it’s holding me back.”

— Augusten Burroughs

184. “He’s a really nice guy, if only I weren’t me.”

— Augusten Burroughs

185. “Normal people hadn’t been molested or reared by a clinically psychotic mother, an alcoholic father, or a perversely mad psychiatrist who wore a Santa hat and performed toilet bowl readings. These were normal people, and I lived among them now. I thought, This must be what I want.”

— Augusten Burroughs

186. “The more obsessed one is with getting thin, the more certain it becomes that one will never get there.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

188. “To nobody’s surprise, steroid use is common among gay men. When you combine a love for men with a love for drama, you end up with a guy on steroids.”

— Augusten Burroughs

189. “Riding back from the grocery store, I realized my father was two men – one he presented to the outside world, and one, far darker, that was always there, behind the face everybody else saw. In my bedroom late that.”

— Augusten Burroughs

190. “He was raised without a proper diagnosis.”

— Augusten Burroughs

191. “Except this “if we’re meant to meet, we’ll meet” attitude isn’t truly relaxed. So we’re not going to commend you for it. This attitude is more passive than relaxed. A passivity born of entitlement. You are owed a soul mate; this has been promised to you since birth. Everybody knows that. So why worry?”

— Augusten Burroughs

192. “The Schnauzer listens to jazz. I listen to jazz because he likes it, and I have even gone to jazz concerts with him, but truthfully I would rather listen to retarded children pounding on pan lids with wooden spoons.”

— Augusten Burroughs

193. “When Group is over, we all pile into the same elevator and nobody says a word. That’s the strange thing about elevators, it’s like they have this power to silence you. I’ve just been in group therapy where people will reveal the most intimate details of their lives to complete strangers, yet in the elevator nobody can say a word.”

— Augusten Burroughs

194. “Dennis’s superior mental health was obvious from the first date, like a cleft palate. The other thing about him was that he had shapely, muscular legs. His calves were so sculpted they looked artificial, like silicone implants. This is a look I’m fond of. In fact, if I had been born a girl there is no doubt in my mind that my chest cavity would have been stuffed with two softball-sized orbs of silicone before my eleventh birthday. In this way my own mental health is somewhat like a cleft palate.”

— Augusten Burroughs

195. “Basically, he liked anything until it harmed him and then he was wary. All creatures in life had an equal chance with my brother, from terrier to psychotherapist. Those that impressed him with an especially keen mental ability, an amusing trick or had a large portion of food to offer would gain his favor. If my brother could find nothing of value to the person, he would dismiss them entirely.”

— Augusten Burroughs

196. “No matter how awful something is, you can always sell tickets.”

— Augusten Burroughs

197. “He’d been single for so long, and the more I knew him, the more I saw the loneliness at his core. I felt like I brought him to life. He.”

— Augusten Burroughs

198. “Applause is a constant thing in AA. It’s how we buy drinks for each other.”

— Augusten Burroughs

199. “Because all of us are made not only of what we have but what we lost. And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition.”

— Augusten Burroughs

200. “If I were a serial killer, I would not be the kind that stabs and then eats the victim. I would be the kind that hides in a tree and shoots at the aerobics class.”

— Augusten Burroughs