Quotes by Augusten Burroughs

If you have one parent who loves you, even if they cant buy you clothes, theyre so poor and they make all kinds of mistakes and maybe sometimes they even give you awful advice, but never for one moment do you doubt their love for you--if you have this, you have incredibly good fortune.If you have two parents who love you? You have won lifes Lotto.If you do not have parents, or if the parents you have are so broken and so, frankly, terrible that they are no improvement over nothing, this is fine.Its not ideal because its harder without adults who love you more than they love themselves. But harder is just harder, thats all.

Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.

I am prone to envy. It is one of my three default emotions, the others being greed and rage. I have also experienced compassion and generosity, but only fleetingly and usually while drunk, so I have little memory.

Doctor, if being a bitch is healthy, then I am the healthiest damn woman on the face of the earth

Just as I had long suspected, a person didnt really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people.

It may seem to you that your life is over now. Your future without the person you love is no future at all.Death is a head-on collision with your plans.But everything in life--the gold fillings of your teeth, the cotton of your sheets, the air you breathe, all the food you will ever eat--everything there is was born from a collision.Inside every single thing that lives is a debt to a distant star that died.Nothing new is ever created without one thing colliding into another.And something new is created when the person you love dies.Because they are not the only ones who die: you die, too. The person you were when you were with them is gone just as surely as they are.This is what you should know about losing somebody you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.

I nodded again, but I knew I would not grow up to drive a bulldozer. It would be awful to be dirty all day like these men. I didnt say it, but at best I would keep one in the backyard, like a goat.

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.

...Trying is not the same as being. Trying flies in a circle around the moment and *being* is inside of it.

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.

I want to write something that means something to someone...the reminds them of what a second, a moment, really is...or that assures them that we are just as lost as they are. I want to write an emotion they are too fragile to let loose, so that my words can do the expression for them, the feeling for them. I want to write beyond the basics and the cliches...I want to write you, I want to write a long walk on a starry night, I want to write an exhale or an inhale...or suffocation.I want to write as clear as my voice could be heard...that is, if I had anything to say.

If you believe suicide will bring you peace, or at the very least just an end to everything you hate- you are displaying self-caring behavior. You are still able to actively seek solutions to your problems. You are willing to go to great lengths to provide what you believe will be soothing to yourself.This strikes me as optimistic.

Im lonely. And Im 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 this lonely because it seems catastrophic.

I was desperate to discover what nothing felt like. It was the absence of something that attracted me. It was the start. Everything important originated with nothingness.

As a young child I had Santa and Jesus all mixed up. I could identify Coke or Pepsi with just one sip, but I could not tell you for sure why they strapped Santa to a cross. Had he missed a house? Had a good little girl somewhere in the world not received the doll he’d promised her, making the father angry?” (p.3)

Part of me felt deep compassion. And another part felt like, You fucker.

When you say, I need more confidence, what youre really saying is, I need those people over there to approve of me.That is the desire to control other people and what they think. The first person who figures out how to do this owns the world.

Even painfully shy and awkward people are not painfully shy or awkward when they are alone. The way to access this natural, comfortable alone-self when you are with others is by choosing to forbid yourself to wonder what they are thinking. Instead, force yourself to exist in the instant, then take it- and give it- as it comes.

Saying just the right thing after a considerable, awkward pause is far less effective than saying the wrong thing with perfect timing. Im telling you.

Its a wonder Im even alive. Sometimes I think that. I think that I cant believe I havent killed myself. But theres something in me that just keeps going on. I think it has something to do with tomorrow, that there always is one, and that everything can change when it comes.