ABAugusten Burroughs

53 collected words

Augusten Burroughs

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

Was I heartbroken or furious? I didn’t know. I did know: that’s it. Our relationship could not continue like this, out of balance, unequal.And as surely as I knew this, I knew something else: But of course it can. We can continue to live exactly as we do right now, in a heavy-lidded state of love and unspeakable compromise. Isn’t that what people do? Every day? Don’t they ache but rename it tired?It made me wonder: Was it even fair to expect the person you’re with to be just as happy as you? Furthermore, how could you ever even know for sure? You couldn’t, was the truth of it. You could not know this.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

02Undated

Real optimism is not the pep talk you give yourself. It is earned through the labor involved in emotional housekeeping.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

03Undated

Long marriages have ended in ruin over tiny and insignificant grievances that were never properly aired and instead grew into a brittle barnacle of hatred.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

04Undated

I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of people and then me, on the outside. Because how do you meet a new person? I was very stunned by this for many years. And then I realized, you just say, "Hi." They may ignore you. Or you may marry them. And that possibility is worth that one word.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

05Undated

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 / quote

06Undated

I want to feel calm and at ease. Like someone who lives in Half Moon Bay, California, and makes hummus from scratch. Instead, I feel like I'm a contestant on some awful supermarket game show where I've got sixty seconds to hurl my shopping cart down the aisles, piling it with as much as possible before the buzzer goes off.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

07Undated

I didn't begin life hating my grandmother. Like every child, I adored her. Until I formed a brain and got to know her.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

08Undated

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 / quote

09Undated

His eyes are so clear and blue that nothing but clichés enter my mind.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

10Undated

His laugh is made of porch swings and lemonade.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

11Undated

Not crazy in a 'let's paint the kitchen bright red!' sort of way. But crazy in a 'gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God' sort of way. Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the wax.p28

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12Undated

The more time I spent at the Finches', the more I realized what a waste of my life this school crap was. It was nothing but a holding tank for kids without bigger plans or ideas.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

13Undated

I know now: what is is all that matters. Not the thing you know is meant to be, not what could be, not what should be, not what ought to be, not what once was.Only the is.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

14Undated

I discovered the bleeding when he licked my hand and left a swath of blood behind, death's autograph.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

15Undated

Glen had a disability more disfiguring than a burn and more terrifying than cancer. Glen had been born on the day after Christmas. "My parents just combine my birthday with Christmas, that's all," he explained.But we knew this was a lie. Glen's parents just wrapped a couple of his Christmas presents in birthday-themed wrapping paper, stuck some candles in a supermarket cake, and had a dinner of Christmas leftovers.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

16Undated

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 / quote

17Undated

I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.

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18Undated

I liked his attention. But I also felt like there was something sick and wrong about it. Like it might make me sick later. I thought of my grandmother, my father's mother. How when I used to visit her in Georgia she would always let me eat all the cookies and frozen egg rolls I wanted. "Go ahead, sweetheart, there's more," she would say. And it seemed okay because she was a grown-up, and I wanted all the Chips Ahoy! cookies in the bag. But I always ended up feeling extremely sick afterward. I looked at book, his eyes swollen with emotion.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

19Undated

I liked his attention. But I also felt like there was something sick and wrong about it. Like it might make me sick later. I thought of my grandmother, my father's mother. How when I used to visit her in Georgia she would always let me eat all the cookies and frozen egg rolls I wanted. "Go ahead, sweetheart, there's more," she would say. And it seemed okay because she was a grown-up, and I wanted all the Chips Ahoy! cookies in the bag. But I always ended up feeling extremely sick afterward. I looked at Bookman, his eyes swollen with emotion.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

20Undated

Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

21Undated

And human instinct is ancient and reliable, utterly mysterious and possibly capable of great genius. I believe that refined, fluent instincts are a person's most valuable asset. My own instincts have repeatedly guided me against the grain of logic and probability. When I have trusted and followed their direction, they have never been wrong. I don't know how or why. But I know that every significant experience-positive or negative-sharpens them and makes them more accurate.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

22Undated

I could not imagine the kind of person that would, upon seeing a crazy talcum-powder-covered Southern lady think to herself, Hmmmm, she might make a great new friend. The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

23Undated

Why am I so anxious? And then it hits me. I'm not anxious, I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be so lonely because it seems catastrophic - seeing the car just as it hits you.

Augusten Burroughs / quote

24Undated

I sit there and think how it isn't fair that I can't drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinking into a decade of hard-core drinking and that is why. I blew my wad.

Augusten Burroughs / quote