Top 350 Augusten Burroughs Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— Augusten Burroughs

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

— Augusten Burroughs

305. “We tried to everything right, now we were forced to do everything wrong and it was working.”

— Augusten Burroughs

306. “It was unnerving, the way she could go from cool efficiency to sarcastic to sweet within the space of thirty seconds. I found it very manipulative and controlling. It put the other person constantly on-guard. And it was extremely intimidating because you never knew when she was going to snap. I made a mental note to refine these skills within myself.”

— Augusten Burroughs

307. “That I wrote six books about my past is the red herring; nothing I have written has in any way altered the past or healed me clean, so no scar remains. Perhaps the process of writing – being fully in the moment, while I write letter by letter – has soothed me because it’s kept me busy. When you’re busy, you lack the time to fondle your emotional baggage. And if that sounds too reductive, remember we crawled from the swamp. Simple isn’t such a terrible thing to be in this respect.”

— Augusten Burroughs

308. “You’re at the crack addict’s apartment? Having a little sandwich?” he says. From the tone of his voice, you’d think I just told him I was hanging out at a playground wearing a NAMBLA t-shirt.”

— Augusten Burroughs

309. “Granted, many of them were indistinguishable blobs in my alcoholic smear of a social life, but I knew how the mind lulled you into a state of perilous complacency when all you had was a personality and a disassociated voice. Meeting.”

— Augusten Burroughs

310. “If you fall out of love, remember the love and not the fall.”

— Augusten Burroughs

311. “We never sampled our drugs because we were afraid of them, but to admit it aloud would have broken the spell.”

— Augusten Burroughs

312. “Fact: upon locking yourself our of your apartment you will immediately need to use the bathroom. Fact: and then you will stand in place and watch your door. You will just stare. As though rebuffed by it. As though it has done this to you.”

— Augusten Burroughs

313. “After a horribly long day, I needed a mental break. I threw on my parka, with the raccoon fur around the hood, and I went to see a movie. But what to see? Something sweet and stupid and harmless. At the movie theater on Second Avenue and Twelfth, a title caught my eye. I thought, ‘That seems good. Jodie Foster and a puffy, friendly farm animal, a butterfly.’ I unzipped my jacket and headed inside to see a movie I’d heard the name of but knew nothing about. It was called Silence Of The Lambs.”

— Augusten Burroughs

314. “Instead of becoming depressed that I was in the locked ward of a mental hospital, I pretended I was playing a role in a movie, possibly on my way to an Emmy.”

— Augusten Burroughs

315. “I had never before considered the possibility that I might never even want a drink yet still be left with this horrible, throbbing vacancy in the center of my being, right where my mental health and contentment were supposed to be.”

— Augusten Burroughs

316. “Optimism sprouts from the knowledge that you are in control of your own life, not your past and not those around you. Part of being in control is taking responsibility for how you feel. This means not just admitting to uncomfortable feelings but then examining your circumstances to see what can be done to change these feelings at the source. Real optimism is not the pep talk you give yourself. It is earned through the labor involved in emotional housekeeping.”

— Augusten Burroughs

317. “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

318. “It’s not such a huge deal when this happens at a 7-Eleven. It’s pretty huge, though, when you spend the entire job interview trying not to come across like a box of hair and you come across like a box of hair.”

— Augusten Burroughs

319. “All I know for sure is that I have accidentally fallen through a wormhole in the universe and stumbled into someone else’s grim life.”

— Augusten Burroughs

320. “I wanted to shove her typewriter on the floor. I hated it and I hated her. I wanted to be a Cosby.”

— Augusten Burroughs

321. “Olives are the wishbones of the cocktail world; rarely are they freely passed along to somebody else.”

— Augusten Burroughs

322. “Before I’m a writer, I’m definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.”

— Augusten Burroughs

323. “I love you,” she said, and I knew she meant it because she spoke the words from the heart at the center of her chest. This, at least, had not been left behind at the hospital.”

— Augusten Burroughs

324. “She’s an excellent presenter and would have succeeded in advertising, is what I think. She generates a sense of excitement in the room and I become aware that my hands are moist with sweat, but not from fear. From needing to know what happened next. I like the drama. I glance around the room and other people look rapt as well. And I feel like, That’s the reason to go to a gay rehab. People appreciate the drama.”

— Augusten Burroughs

325. “And not worry about what to write about, but just write. Or, if I’m going to worry about what to write, then do this worrying on paper, so at least I’m writing and will have a record of the anxiety.”

— Augusten Burroughs

326. “I realized I’d only seen him at night in dim, flattering restaurant lighting. The sun was not his friend.”

— Augusten Burroughs

327. “Sometimes, I wrap aluminum foil around Cream’s middle, around her legs and her tail and then I walk her through the house on a leash. I like it when she’s shiny, like a star, like a guest on the Donnie and Marie Show.”

— Augusten Burroughs

328. “I think people might think, oh, I don’t want to approach the big famous author because it’s embarrassing, but then they think for two seconds about it and realize, this is, like, a toilet bowl reader.”

— Augusten Burroughs

329. “If you don’t like smoking don’t even bother getting sober, just stay drunk.”

— Augusten Burroughs

330. “I understood, I need to write. Live here, in my words, and my head. I need to go inside, that’s all. No big, complicated, difficult thing. I just need to go in reverse.”

— Augusten Burroughs

331. “In preschool, when somebody hurts us, the teacher sees to it that the person who hurt us apologizes. It is ingrained in us from a very early age that inflicted pain or wrongdoing or unfairness should and will be corrected. Note the passive phrasing: “be corrected.” We will not, as children, take control and make sure these amends are delivered in a timely fashion.”

— Augusten Burroughs

332. “What you’ve written isn’t a novel. It’s a cry for help.” I.”

— Augusten Burroughs

333. “A tear wells in his eye. It wells and then spills down his cheek. And despite being pumped with booze and coke, I can read that one eye as clearly as a billboard for cigarettes. Only instead of saying Alive with Pleasure it says, I Have to Go Now.”

— Augusten Burroughs

334. “You can never replace it. The good news is you do learn to live without it. You miss it. You want it. You hang out with a bunch of other crazy people who feel the same way and you live with it. And eventually, you start to sound like a cloying self-help book, like me.”

— Augusten Burroughs

335. “What I think of blogs is just this: Some are beautifully written and many are not. But even blogs that aren’t necessarily “well” written are great for the person writing them.”

— Augusten Burroughs

336. “Sometimes, people avoid recognizing how they feel because they believe the feelings are a part of them, and admitting to harboring anger or jealousy feels like admitting to a physical flaw. So certain feelings are denied. Which is something like believing your house is clean as long as you don’t peek under the beds.”

— Augusten Burroughs

337. “Freedom was what we had. Nobody told us when to go to bed. Nobody told us to do our homework. Nobody told us we couldn’t drink two six-packs of Budweiser and then throw up in the Maytag.”

— Augusten Burroughs

338. “I would borrow the microphone and stuff it down the front of my pants, examining myself from every angle in the mirror.”

— Augusten Burroughs

339. “It’s okay to like me, because I’m just like you.” Everybody feels a bit like a dented can inside. Even the slickest, most polished person you can think of is more aware of their shortcomings and flaws than their talents and gifts.”

— Augusten Burroughs

340. “As a writer, you can’t allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward.”

— Augusten Burroughs

341. “I can almost never say what I’m thinking at any given moment. I would have been stabbed to death years ago.”

— Augusten Burroughs

342. “It wasn’t like he was holding me so much as trying to hold onto something.”

— Augusten Burroughs

343. “I steered my lips across his jawline and to his mouth. I kissed him. These were open-mouth kisses, young people’s kisses, hungry and full at the same time, in love, at home.”

— Augusten Burroughs

344. “These core certainties are sheltered from your scrutiny. Because you know you can depend on them, you never question them.”

— Augusten Burroughs

345. “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.”

— Augusten Burroughs

346. “I referred albums to the more modern eight tracks. Albums came with sleeves which reminded me of clean underwear. Plus, the pictures were bigger, making it easier to see each follicle of Tony Orlando’s shiny arm hair.”

— Augusten Burroughs

347. “I came to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren’t alone.”

— Augusten Burroughs

348. “Like socks in a dryer, it had vanished into the ether.”

— Augusten Burroughs

349. “I made very good money and spent all of it every week. I lived paycheck to paycheck...”

— Augusten Burroughs

350. “And possibility was my fuel. It was the One Thing that prevented me from slitting my wrists on any given horrid day. The fact that at any moment, everything could change.”

— Augusten Burroughs