Quotes by Augusten Burroughs

This is what you should know about losing someone you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.

My question was:How did I go from merely seeing the dirty French Santa in a bar to being in his hotel room the next morning? And this presented me with an actual equation. How did one plus one equal old French Santa?

I confidently walked up to the counter, and his friends moved to the side to let me through. I handed him the note. Happy Birthday, I said. Then I smiled and walked out of the store. I did my crossing-the street trick again, lurking in the shadows and watching. I could see him turn the note over in his hand, open it and read, then turn it over again. He passed it to his friends, who passed it between them. Then I watched him make a shrugging gesture with his hands. And then they were all laughing again. My mortification was total and overpowering. I was suddenly having a very difficult time standing. I had experienced a perfect note of utter and true clarity. He was straight.

I slipped on a turtleneck, laughing when my head became stuck in the turtle part. If they werent called turtlenecks, I wouldnt have worn them.

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.

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

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.

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.

He continues to smile expectantly. I take a step back. I dont want to catch whatever he has. He is a disturbing out-of-uniform Santa.

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 Im a contestant on some awful supermarket game show where Ive got sixty seconds to hurl my shopping cart down the aisles, piling it with as much as possible before the buzzer goes off.

I didnt begin life hating my grandmother. Like every child, I adored her. Until I formed a brain and got to know her.

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.

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

His laugh is made of porch swings and lemonade.

Not crazy in a lets 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

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.

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.

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

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, thats all, he explained.But we knew this was a lie. Glens 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.

Its not such a huge deal when this happens at a 7-Eleven. Its 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.