Top 350 Augusten Burroughs Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Perfectionism is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

258. “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

259. “Lately, I am receiving numerous calls each night from telemarketers. They’re calling with the frequent urgency of dumped boyfriends. At this point, I cannot help but wonder, is the entire telemarketing industry one big, jilted, clingy gay guy?”

— Augusten Burroughs

260. “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

261. “He likes people because he likes to share in conversations. I like people when they have large checks for me.”

— Augusten Burroughs

262. “Therapy could be of tremendous benefit to “getting over” one’s past if the therapy is focused on specific ways to stop submitting to the temptation to obsess. Many people with difficult histories carry these histories with them, burnishing the past with each retelling.”

— Augusten Burroughs

263. “By engaging with the person you’re with. Which means, not thinking while they’re speaking and not forming your answer as they are in the middle of asking the question. Engaging with the person means following carefully what they say, going for the full ride of their dialogue. So that you don’t skip over a nuance by mistake. This is what’ll keep you from zoning out, avoiding eye contact, looking at the wall like a freak, or sweating too much.”

— Augusten Burroughs

264. “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

265. “Augusten very distant tonight. Probably because of my games.”

— Augusten Burroughs

266. “I was struck with a bolt of distilled horror like I have never known before. Far worse than suddenly finding yourself walking through a prison cafeteria wearing Daisy Duke shorts and a Jane Fonda headband.”

— Augusten Burroughs

267. “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

268. “Marriage is overdone. As long as there are people, people are going to find it interesting.”

— Augusten Burroughs

269. “What I am certain of is that there’s something wonky going on beneath the surface of what we call reality. Things are not as they appear. They are much, much more.”

— Augusten Burroughs

270. “It was time to leave. He was insufferable, had toilet problems, looked demented to begin with, and now he was the accomplice to a cat killer. Yet did I leave? No, I sat there. And I thought, What has happened to me? Why am I not rising up off the sofa? Why am I not leaving?”

— Augusten Burroughs

271. “We did not pass one other Mercury Merkur XR4Ti the entire way.”

— Augusten Burroughs

272. “See, alcoholism is exactly like bubble gum. You know when you blow a bubble and it bursts, some of the gum sticks to you chin? What’s the only thing that gets the bubble gum off your chin? Bubble gum. You have to take the bubble gum out of your mouth and press it against the gum on your chin and it’ll pick it up. Only an alcoholic can treat another alcoholic. Only other alcoholics can get you sober.”

— Augusten Burroughs

273. “I knew that he was as reliable as a mathematical formula.”

— Augusten Burroughs

274. “I tend to really enjoy being swept up in fiction. I love a good story and I admire fiction authors.”

— Augusten Burroughs

275. “We had a wealth of something we didn’t want, but the wealth itself was intoxicating and we invented games just so we could experience the sensation of having too much of something.”

— Augusten Burroughs

276. “I’m grateful for a lot of things. One is not being a drunk wreck. Or losing all four limbs in some ridiculous East Village bus accident that I was so destined for.”

— Augusten Burroughs

277. “Normal people who weren’t raised by mentally ill goats probably took the feeling of safety for granted. They only noticed when they suddenly felt unsafe. When the hands reach up for under the bed and grab their ankles, they scream, whereas I’m like “Wait, can you scratch my knee before you kill me?”

— Augusten Burroughs

278. “I placed my hand against the side of his precious, electric face and felt the stubble beneath my fingers. I was overwhelmed with the lust and wonder of it all.”

— Augusten Burroughs

279. “And we were married and all the windows were open but the smell of flowers was so thick and sickly sweet. I felt like I might choke to death.”

— Augusten Burroughs

280. “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

281. “My goal was to get through the day as fast as possible. I worked fast because I wanted to be done. I wanted to be done because I wanted to go home to my nest and drink.”

— Augusten Burroughs

282. “To me, these people were as exotic as animals in a zoo. I’d never seen anything like them. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be one of them or simply live among them taking notes and photographs.”

— Augusten Burroughs

283. “I hate when you play therapist. Especially with your accent. It makes everything you say sound so BBC.”

— Augusten Burroughs

284. “I said all the wrong things. Except when I was busy saying all the mean ones and in the end I hated everybody and everything.”

— Augusten Burroughs

285. “Feeling like you cannot stand one more minute doesn’t mean you can’t. You can, actually. It’s incredibly easy to stop smoking. And it’s horrifically uncomfortable. Then not quite horrifically uncomfortable. Then it’s damn uncomfortable. Then it’s uncomfortable. Then it’s not as uncomfortable as it was at first. Then it’s not so bad. And then you don’t smoke anymore. And you don’t miss it.”

— Augusten Burroughs

286. “I sat up and my mouth tasted horrible, like stale pot, beer and Cheetos. The exact combination of ingredients that had caused me to pass into unconsciousness on Natalie’s floor.”

— Augusten Burroughs

287. “I realized I could do anything to him and he would never hate me. I could never drive him away, spoil things between us, or otherwise sour things in his eyes, because he already knew how horrible I could be, yet he loved me, anyway.”

— Augusten Burroughs

288. “Regret can power your telescope, changing what you see.”

— Augusten Burroughs

289. “I think you’re healthy in certain ways, and I think you’re a pathetic disaster in others.”

— Augusten Burroughs

290. “The best person you can be is the person you are when you are alone on a random Thursday. That’s who you are.”

— Augusten Burroughs

291. “So if you think the job really suits you, be you.”

— Augusten Burroughs

292. “I like the bad one better,′ I said. ‘She had flying monkeys, and the good one was tacky and seemed kind of dumb.”

— Augusten Burroughs

293. “Life is too huge for you to possibly hate.”

— Augusten Burroughs

294. “If you loathe your job, the situation is improved if you can do it in your underwear. Drunk.”

— Augusten Burroughs

295. “There is always dishonesty at the heart of unhappiness.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

297. “Now he was the dish of wrapped peppermints next to the cash register that I didn’t want because they were free. Because.”

— Augusten Burroughs

298. “If my mother was odd enough to crave a bubble bath at three in the morning, Dorothy was inventive enough to suggest adding broken glass to the tub. If my mother insisted on listening to West Side Story repeatedly, it was Dorothy who said, ‘Let’s listen to it on forty-five!’ And when my mother announced that she wanted a fur wrap like Auntie Mame, Dorothy bought her an unstable Norwegian elkhound from a puppy mill.”

— Augusten Burroughs

299. “Because I’ve lived in one room my entire life, working at the same table that you use to pay bills at and eat at. It’s going to be nice to have actual space.”

— Augusten Burroughs

300. “I thought, This is how it feels inside the right decision.”

— Augusten Burroughs