Top 350 Augusten Burroughs Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “What little factual information I absorbed in my life was gleaned from lectures the Professor gave to Gilligan. For.”

— Augusten Burroughs

253. “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

254. “As my friend Amy observed: “Divorce is like a Polaroid picture. What truly happened will develop over time and you will see.”

— Augusten Burroughs

255. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “While there are some things from which you never heal, so be it. The truth about healing is that you don’t need to heal to be whole.”

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

272. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

274. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

279. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

282. “We have no control over anything large in life; only the small details are under our direct management. But even then, we lack any real authority.”

— Augusten Burroughs

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “One minute we were sitting at the lowly kitchen table moaning about the sorry state of our lives and the next we were liberating the architecture with heavy projectiles. This was pure, freedom. Better than sniffing glue.”

— Augusten Burroughs

289. “Despite evidence to the contrary, I hated drinking to the point that I misplaced really big slabs of time.”

— Augusten Burroughs

290. “In a way, I am a psychological transsexual, always trying to “pass” for a normal person but being clocked every time.”

— Augusten Burroughs

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

296. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

298. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs