Top 350 Augusten Burroughs Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “The Anti-christ of mental health and emotional maturity.”

— Augusten Burroughs

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

209. “Avoid self-pity by taking responsibility for everything that happens to you, even if somebody else is at fault. By taking responsibility, I don’t mean play doormat. I mean, repair yourself. Move forward. Move on. Then, only then, see if you can wrangle some empathy.”

— Augusten Burroughs

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “This is what I’m saying: you hate your life. But you don’t know what life is. Life is too huge for you to possibly hate. If you hate 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

215. “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

216. “The year I snuck an interracial lesbian couple into the background of an American Airlines commercial, I was feeling particularly flush.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

225. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

228. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

230. “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

231. “You’re supposed to go to a meeting. I mean, as much as you hate them or if they feel stupid or you just don’t want to go. The thing is, if you go to a meeting, you won’t drink that day. It’s like a minibrainwash. It kind of fixes you for a little while.” But then I say, “Of course if I’m really wallowing in self-pity, then I’ll tell myself, ‘Pighead would give anything to feel this uncomfortable right now.’ ” So there’s always the auto–guilt trip method.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

233. “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

234. “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

235. “Self-pity isn’t the most accurate description for this feeling because it describes only half of it: sad for me, I’m hurt. What’s missing is the other half: and you need to do something about it.”

— Augusten Burroughs

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

244. “She reminded me of a scatterbrained old Cadillac that had been driven into the ground but somehow kept on starting, without fuss.”

— Augusten Burroughs

245. “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

246. “I had always had the oddest feeling, consider it knowledge, that if I were ever to find myself inside the cockpit of a 767 with two dead piolets and afew hundred passengers in the cabin behind me, I would absolutely be able to land the ninety-thousand-pound jet.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

248. “You can see self-pity every day if you live near a playground like I do. Little kids trip or get shoved and they fall over all the time. Usually, they don’t appear to be hurt. They look surprised to see that what was just an instant ago beneath their shoes is now pressed up against their nose. Little kids also know that injuries are an opportunity for extra affection. So whenever you see a little kid take a spill, they’ll look around to verify a nearby adult presence and then they’ll let it rip.”

— Augusten Burroughs

249. “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

250. “It was so extraordinarily out of the ordinary.”

— Augusten Burroughs