Top 350 Augusten Burroughs Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

166. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

175. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

184. “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

185. “Usually, they started with just two people bickering over something small. Like what to watch on TV. Then a third person would enter the room and see two people screaming over the TV and they’d decide to moderate, only they’d end up taking a side. Eventually, someone else would get sucked in.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

188. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

193. “Most everybody had made at least one bad, drunken decision in their lives. Called an ex at two in the morning. Or perhaps has a little too much to drink on a second date and wept inconsolably while revealing how simply damaged one was, while nonetheless retaining an uncommonly large capacity for love. That kind of thing was, while regrettable, at least comprehensible. But waking up with someone generationally inappropriate, like your grandfather’s best buddy?”

— 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. “It turned out I had always been a smoker. I just hadn’t had any cigarettes.”

— Augusten Burroughs

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

199. “Well, you know, just some old man all alone. God, I hope I don’t end up alone like that. Some pathetic old woman with nobody to go on a whale watch with.”

— Augusten Burroughs

200. “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