Top 350 Augusten Burroughs Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I think out of seven billion people, there is probably more than just one soul mate. Surely, the paid employee in charge of each person’s love life has taken into account the possibility of fatal snake bites and heavy falling objects.”

— Augusten Burroughs

202. “I was learning that if I lived slightly in the future-what will happen next-I didn’t have to feel so much about what was going on in the present.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

204. “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

205. “The Anti-christ of mental health and emotional maturity.”

— Augusten Burroughs

206. “How many of the things I fear or dread are actually things that I want?”

— Augusten Burroughs

207. “Whenever you lose something of great value, it’s important to focus on its value to you and not on the loss of it.”

— Augusten Burroughs

208. “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

209. “This is the right house and the right life, but it’s weird because I’ve never had a home before; I’ve had addresses.”

— Augusten Burroughs

210. “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

211. “Because here is the truth: If you want to have a chance at meeting somebody with whom you are genuinely compatible, never put your best foot forward.”

— Augusten Burroughs

212. “I wish I had a tray table in my bedroom and I wish I smoked, just so I could extinguish my smoking materials.”

— Augusten Burroughs

213. “I’m like the guy who prepares your taxes or a dentist. I’m very conservative and boring in a lot of ways.”

— Augusten Burroughs

214. “God, I felt certain, did not mind that I didn’t press my hands together to pray. I was casual, but I was sincere. I knew that God existed as the Correct Answer inside my chest.”

— Augusten Burroughs

215. “Being busy is not the same as being focused. Being focused means being here.”

— Augusten Burroughs

216. “There is helium in his tone of voice, a lightness that means mischief.”

— Augusten Burroughs

217. “I think writers tend to be experience junkies, and I think they also tend to want to be on the outside looking in.”

— Augusten Burroughs

218. “After I got my coffee, I leaned against a stop sign and sipped, pretending it was a normal day and I was only up this early so that I could go running and not because I’d just been on a killing spree.”

— Augusten Burroughs

219. “I never question the way I write. Writing is the only thing that’s without seams for me. It’s an effort to talk because my pictures have to be turned into these sounds. It’s an effort to be alive. It’s work. But writing is wonderful.”

— Augusten Burroughs

220. “I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes.”

— Augusten Burroughs

221. “It’s weird – sort of not terribly wise – to take a book that was successful and then change its cover.”

— Augusten Burroughs

222. “I never listen to music when I write.”

— Augusten Burroughs

223. “It terrified me to consider: What if, as a grown-up, I craved another body beside me as still as this one? What then?”

— Augusten Burroughs

224. “Because the minister’s wife refused to leave the minister, and because my mother required a worshipful companion, she was forced to break up with Fern and secure herself a new mate. As luck would have it, Dr. Finch had recently begun seeing a suicidal eighteen-year-old African-American girl who had taken a leave of absence from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her name was Dorothy.”

— Augusten Burroughs

225. “You know, sometimes just giving yourself permission to feel any emotion without judgment or censorship can lessen the intensity of those negative emotions.”

— Augusten Burroughs

226. “I understood that I was clearly insane. But he apparently hadn’t picked up on how many times in one short letter I asserted that I was not. This acceptance of my questionable mental health made me feel confident that we would be compatible, possibly for life. I.”

— Augusten Burroughs

227. “When your psychiatrist forgets to look at the clock and is hanging on your every word, that’s when you know, out of all his patients, you are the sickest. He.”

— Augusten Burroughs

228. “He continues to smile expectantly. I take a step back. I don’t want to catch whatever he has. He is a disturbing out-of-uniform Santa.”

— Augusten Burroughs

229. “Even though I am wary of Nature. After all, where do most manhunts for escaped serial killers begin? Exactly. In the woods.”

— Augusten Burroughs

230. “My mistake was in underestimating the emotional force of a song you have already hear a thousand times.”

— Augusten Burroughs

231. “But she had wanted it to work so she ignored these things. This is what happens when you go against the grain of truth: you get splinters later on.”

— Augusten Burroughs

232. “And then just as suddenly, I felt absolutely nothing. It was like a door quickly opened, showing me what horrible feelings I had inside, and then slammed shut again so I wouldn’t have to actually face them. In many ways I felt I was living the life of a doctor in the ER. I was learning to block out all emotions in order to deal with the situation.”

— Augusten Burroughs

233. “Loss creates a greater overall surface area within a person. You expand as a result of it. Though it may very well feel like the opposite.”

— Augusten Burroughs

234. “Never, ever try to impress somebody. Be exactly the person you would be if you were alone or with somebody it was safe to fart around.”

— Augusten Burroughs

235. “The truth is that life itself is brutally, obscenely unfair. Consider all those other millions of sperm cells that were just as good as the one that resulted in you, and where are they now? Dead, nowhere.”

— Augusten Burroughs

236. “You must never allow something that happened to you to become a morbidly treasured heirloom that you carry, show people, put back in its black velvet pouch and then tuck back into your jacket where you can keep it close to your heart.”

— Augusten Burroughs

237. “I was in advertising for years. That was cushy, you know? It’s pretty cushy in a lot of ways, but I hated it.”

— Augusten Burroughs

238. “With my own memoirs, they are truthful, and I write everything fully expecting to some day end up televised on Court TV, and I’m fully prepared to be challenged legally on it. Everything I write is the truth and I know that I would win.”

— Augusten Burroughs

239. “I am tired from having lived seventeen different lives, compressed into the space of one.”

— Augusten Burroughs

240. “My life came complete with a factory-installed biological brother seven years my senior.”

— Augusten Burroughs

241. “It is an awful, just sickening feeling, I discovered, to live with somebody, to exist in the midst of sharing a life, only to realize it is utterly doomed. It was botulism of the soul. I’d had such ambition for building a life together, because I wanted that strength of character and security. But I had overlooked the most important thing: he wasn’t right for me. I wasn’t right for him. Merely wanting us to be right and good together wasn’t enough.”

— Augusten Burroughs

242. “When I ate vanilla frosting straight from the can, I could feel God standing right nest to me like a real best friend, watching, and smiling, and wishing he had a mouth.”

— Augusten Burroughs

243. “There are times in life when logic and reason and probability must be recognized, but then ignored.”

— Augusten Burroughs

244. “Perfectionism is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If.”

— Augusten Burroughs

245. “There’s not enough of me left over.”

— Augusten Burroughs

246. “The most I would do was use the shadow tool in Photoshop to bring out the muscular rips in my stomach, which were honestly there. Beneath the fat.”

— Augusten Burroughs

247. “That may be true,” I thought, “But they don’t have digital cable or Internet access, so really what’s the point of being alive?” Civilized life, with all its threats and potential dooms, is too much to bear without the respite of three hundred channels. True, Osama bin Laden may very well send nuclear-bomb-filled suitcases on Amtrak trains into Penn Station, but until then: “I Love the 80s on VH1.”

— Augusten Burroughs

248. “When you feel spontaneously excited by something – a new career you never thought about, a haircut you see in a magazine and want – shame is the voice that brings you “back down to earth.”

— Augusten Burroughs

249. “I never could have written the screenplay because I would have been forced to learn new software and I can’t learn one more thing.”

— Augusten Burroughs

250. “Everybody in recovery smokes. If you don’t like smoking, don’t even bother trying to get sober. Just stay drunk.”

— Augusten Burroughs