110+ Augusten Burroughs Quotes On Education, Friendship And Candid

Augusten Burroughs is an American writer. He is best known for his memoirs Running with Scissors (2002) and Dry (2003). He has also written several other books and essays, and is a frequent contributor to public radio's This American Life. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Augusten Burroughs on education, life, love.

Top 10 Augusten Burroughs Quotes

1. ...handsome people are always interesting to watch. But a handsome person in crisis is riveting.
2. You would be amazed by what you can give up, lose, or break, and yet still be a person who gets happy over brownies.
3. You need to grab your dream out of the sky like it's a kite and pinch the string through your fingers until you reach the spool.
4. I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.
5. I can't tell you how much I love Target and Costco, that kind of culture, because it's something I never felt a part of. I've always felt like a tourist because I have never fit in anywhere.
6. Should I just sit down, right here at carousel seven, and shake until somebody's arms are around me and they're saying, 'It's okay, I'm here, I'm here, come with me to the institute.
7. His laugh is made if porch swings and lemonade
8. But I can also write in crappy motel rooms, while standing in line, or sitting in the dentist's chair.
9. I wouldn't want to waste any of my brain cells on forgiving if it's holding me back.
10. When people meet me, many times they're very surprised because they expect someone who is kind of wacky with seven piercings and very hip and cool and New York City, and I'm not.

Augusten Burroughs Short Quotes

• Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.
• Like cubic zirconia, I only look real. I'm an imposter. The fact is, I am not like other people.
• Red hair is great. It's rare, and therefore superior.
• Imperfections are attractive when their owners are happy with them.
• It turned out I had always been a smoker. I just hadn't had any cigarettes.
• This is what happens when you go against the grain of truth. You get splinters later on.
• Bad news should be followed with soup. Then a nap.
• In some ways, blogging is like drinking - it gives a person permission to be a total asshole.
• It was a salad bar of phobias
• And I tend to listen to NPR when I'm not writing.

Augusten Burroughs Quotes About Life

This is how you survive the unsurvivable, this is how you lose that which you cannot bear to lose, this is how you reinvent yourself, overcome your abusers, fulfill your ambitions and meet the love of your life: by following what is true, no matter where it leads you. — Augusten Burroughs

Miracles do happen. You must believe this. No matter what else you believe about life, you must believe in miracles. — Augusten Burroughs

Any damage that's been done, you have to fix yourself because it needs fixing and there is nobody else to do the work. Blame may well be justified, but it's not going to move you forward in your life. — Augusten Burroughs

I'll always write about what's going on in my life and the reason for that is it's not actually because I'm so fascinated with myself, it's because I can't think. I can't think like have thoughts in my head and think them through and come to a conclusion. It's like math for me. — Augusten Burroughs

But my favorite band is Curbside Life, out of Chicago. — Augusten Burroughs

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work. — Augusten Burroughs

There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth. — Augusten Burroughs

Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal. — Augusten Burroughs

I've learned how to turn the adversities in my life into enriching experiences. You can actually gain a lot from adversities and they make you the person you are today. — Augusten Burroughs

You can make almost anything a learning or positive experience. I think I offer a good example of how to make the most out of what life gives you and how to keep moving on. — Augusten Burroughs

Augusten Burroughs Quotes About Love

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

The truth is that nobody is owed an apology for anything. Apologies are lovely when they happen. But they change nothing. They do not reverse actions or correct damage. They are merely nice to hear. — Augusten Burroughs

Love is a helium-based emotion; Love always takes the high road. — Augusten Burroughs

I tend to really enjoy being swept up in fiction. I love a good story and I admire fiction authors. — Augusten Burroughs

I love to both give and receive very old books. — Augusten Burroughs

So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography - and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment. — Augusten Burroughs

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

All children should be loved, protected, nurtured --emotionally and intellectually-- respected, and never, under any circumstances, underestimated. — Augusten Burroughs

But she did love him. I believe it. I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention. — Augusten Burroughs

I think I love him, but I also think that you can love people who aren't good for you. — Augusten Burroughs

Augusten Burroughs Famous Quotes And Sayings

Self-pity is the bestiality of emotions: it absolutely disgusts people. When you're feeling pity for yourself, and somebody says to you 'You think maybe it's time for the pity party to be over? You should stop feeling sorry for yourself and try to think positive,' it makes you wish you could saw their head off. — Augusten Burroughs

I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen. — Augusten Burroughs

The truth about not having everything you need, not being fully equipped or qualified or allowed is that these limits are the nebula of creative genius. When you have total freedom i.e: no limits at all. You stop trying to make the best of things — Augusten Burroughs

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

Acceptance, when it comes, arrives in waves: Listen with your chest. You will feel a pendulum swing within you, favoring one direction or another. And that is your answer. The answer is always inside your chest. The right choice weighs more. That's how you know. It causes you to lean in its direction. — Augusten Burroughs

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

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

Some damage is too severe, some harm endures. And what you have to do is accept it. And by accept it I mean, don’t be the paralyzed person in the bed who is waiting to walk again. Realize, it’s never gonna happen. And find some other way to get around –swing from a vine, get a Mad Max wheelchair. Anything but…wait. — Augusten Burroughs

Maybe you feel pressure to be positive because so many people rely on your good, fake-positive energy? If that's the case, screw everybody else. You're not a bottle of Valium. — Augusten Burroughs

You must never allow something that happened to you to become a morbidly treasured heirloom that you carry, show people, put back in its black velvet pouch and then tuck back into your jacket where you can keep it close to your heart. — Augusten Burroughs

Thanksgiving was nothing more than a pilgrim-created obstacle in the way of Christmas; a dead bird in the street that forced a brief detour. — Augusten Burroughs

And of course, the answer came to me in the same way Jesus comes to those who drink in trailers: as an epiphany. — Augusten Burroughs

The dark side of blogging is, of course, people can be (and are) just savage and uncivilized, deeply cruel and fully unaccountable. — Augusten Burroughs

Do not wait for the healing to arrive. It will never come. The holes will never leave or be filled with anything at all. But holes are interesting things. — Augusten Burroughs

Perfection is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If you are a perfectionist, at least stop telling everybody you're one and try to get over it yourself, alone in your home with the lights off — Augusten Burroughs

Because here is the truth: If you want to have a chance at meeting somebody with whom you are genuinely compatible, never put your best foot forward. — Augusten Burroughs

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. — Augusten Burroughs

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

[Christmas] holidays are a heavy, heavy time. We make light of them with our red and green and our stockings and candy canes, but people think heavy thoughts over the holidays because that's when you're thinking about family. Are we close? Or are we not as close as other people? — Augusten Burroughs

I felt a bottomless sadness. So completely alone. Like one of my stuffed animals at home that I was too old for now, that sat on the shelf in my closet, mashed against the back wall. — Augusten Burroughs

My mistake was in underestimating the emotional force of a song you have already hear a thousand times. — Augusten Burroughs

I hate news and information and anything that threatens to puncture the bubble of oblivion in which I live. — Augusten Burroughs

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

My thoughts seem thick, ketchup stuck in a bottle. Like trying to feel someone's face while wearing goosedown mittens. — Augusten Burroughs

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

I was on the cover of a lot of newspapers. I was on the cover of USA Today for every single day for a month. I was on the masthead, so I tend to get recognized a lot, and in weird places. It's always flattering, and it's always odd. It's always at the worst possible time. — Augusten Burroughs

I like, though, that people have a hunger to connect with other people. They're desperate to know that you're not lying to them or misleading them. — Augusten Burroughs

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

Childhood is what ended me up in the hospital and teetering on the edge of deathly alcoholism. It was really good for me to accept it. To accept all the embarrassment and the shame so I don't feel like I used to. — Augusten Burroughs

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? — Augusten Burroughs

I've just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I'm now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father. — Augusten Burroughs

As a child, I was never drawn toward depraved or extreme situations; I really wanted a normal little childhood. Unfortunately, that's just not what happened. — Augusten Burroughs

The most mortifying fact of my life is something that happened when I was fourteen and I have never admitted to anyone: not to friends nor therapists; not even in rehab when we were detailing our own personal spirals of shame did I confess. It is this: I am a graduate of the Barbizon School of Modeling. — Augusten Burroughs

What nobody understood then is this: The only way that you achieve what you want and fulfill your dreams and become great is by demanding that sort of attention. You have to make it happen. — Augusten Burroughs

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

The Schnauzer listens to jazz. I listen to jazz because he likes it, and I have even gone to jazz concerts with him, but truthfully I would rather listen to retarded children pounding on pan lids with wooden spoons. — Augusten Burroughs

And I began to let him go. Hour by hour. Days into months. It was a physical sensation, like letting out the string of a kite. Except that the string was coming from my center. — Augusten Burroughs

I'm like the guy who prepares your taxes or a dentist. I'm very conservative and boring in a lot of ways. — Augusten Burroughs

My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron. — Augusten Burroughs

I think people tend to see the bigger point, which is maybe not fitting in and feeling like you didn't have the childhood that you expected you would have, or that you felt lonely or struggled with drugs and alcohol or just that you were able to achieve your dreams. — Augusten Burroughs

Maybe it was a Patty Hearst thing. Stockholm syndrome or whatever it's called when you're being held against your will but then you become sucked in and fall in love. Or if not exactly love, you fall into something you can't see out of. 'I can't shoot a machine gun' becomes 'Hey, this hardly has any kick-back! — Augusten Burroughs

You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind. — Augusten Burroughs

God, I felt certain, did not mind that I didn’t press my hands together to pray. I was casual, but I was sincere. I knew that God existed as the Correct Answer inside my chest. — Augusten Burroughs

As I sat in the hot, salty water, I thought, 'No wonder Mr. Bubble always gives me a urinary tract infection and hives.' Mr. Bubble was for common people. Mr. Bubble was for my so-called brother, their true child. I was a Vanderbilt. I should bathe in condiments and seasonings. — Augusten Burroughs

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

I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness. — Augusten Burroughs

And in my mind, this settles the issue. I would never drink cologne, and am therefore not an alcoholic. — Augusten Burroughs

I always tried to learn Greek, but all I got out of it was, "poulaki mou." ["My little chicken."] — Augusten Burroughs

Saying just the right thing after a considerable, awkward pause is far less effective than saying the wrong thing with perfect timing. I'm telling you. — Augusten Burroughs

In the same way that a tornado rips the roof off a double-wide trailer, leaving the occupants dazed and staring at the clouds from the splinters of what used to be their living room, it was over. — Augusten Burroughs

Confidence is a reduction of your own interest in whether others are thinking about you and if so, what they're thinking. — Augusten Burroughs

Think of the actual physical elements that compose our bodies: we are 98 percent hydrogen and oxygen and carbon. That's table sugar. You are made of the same stuff as table sugar. Just a couple of tiny differences here and there and look what happened to the sugar: it can stand upright and send tweets. — Augusten Burroughs

But even with my minimal amount of fame, there are certain perks. Recently, I was at a movie premier, and at the party after the movie, Meryl Streep was loose, walking around the room like a normal person. Absolutely nothing was preventing me from lunging toward her and shrieking "Dingoes ate my baby! Dingoes ate my baby! — Augusten Burroughs

I never listen to music when I write. — Augusten Burroughs

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

But then, look at me. My brain is incorrectly formed, and I'm shaped like a tube. Plus, I'm an alcoholic, a "survivor" of childhood sexual abuse, was raised in a cult and have no education. So, really, if you think about it, the only thing that separates me from the guy with the stinky foot and no teeth is a book deal and some cologne. — Augusten Burroughs

I was like a packet of powdered Sea Monkeys and they were like water. — Augusten Burroughs

I feel like they are two different things, and when I write books, they're just books. If they can be movies that's okay. But I would write a novel that couldn't be a film. — Augusten Burroughs

I'm always prepared for the worst. — Augusten Burroughs

If I were a serial killer, I would not be the kind that stabs and then eats the victim. I would be the kind that hides in a tree and shoots at the aerobics class. — Augusten Burroughs

I don't sit down at nine in the morning and begin writing and then take a break for lunch and stop at four. I have no structure like that. I am at my computer constantly, more or less attached to it. I live on-line and hate being off-line and don't care how unhealthy it is. — Augusten Burroughs

Because I've lived in one room my entire life, working at the same table that you use to pay bills at and eat at. It's going to be nice to have actual space. — Augusten Burroughs

and she's a nurse. do you know how hard nursing school is? it's like medical school. so she's obviously smart. — Augusten Burroughs

I don't read memoirs. But if you write a memoir, I would think you'd want people to know, "O.K., look, I've taken some liberties here." It's just a matter of being open with your readers. — Augusten Burroughs

Nobody's trying to kill you, Deirdre. You're killing yourself. — Augusten Burroughs

Time moves only forward, never back. We look forward to a moment and then it arrives and an instant later it is gone. Like something on the surface of a river that we reached for but did not touch in time and it carried on, away. You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind. — Augusten Burroughs

He's a really nice guy, if only I weren't me. — Augusten Burroughs

I don't really think of my blog as a real blog. It's a lame blog. It's more like my when-the-mood-strikes update, or smoke signal. — Augusten Burroughs

I remember, no matter how impossible it seemed that any given day would end, it always did. This one would, too. — Augusten Burroughs

We were young. We were bored. And the old electroshock therapy machine was just under the stairs in a box next to the Hoover. — Augusten Burroughs

Just as I had long suspected, a person didn't really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people. — Augusten Burroughs

What police officer would dare ticket Death's minivan? — Augusten Burroughs

My window fogs and this makes me feel like there is no world outside of the car. — Augusten Burroughs

Stars should not be seen alone. That's why there are so many. Two people should stand together and look at them. One person alone will surely miss the good ones. — Augusten Burroughs

I think writers tend to be experience junkies, and I think they also tend to want to be on the outside looking in. — Augusten Burroughs

After was better. Before was only there so After could happen. — Augusten Burroughs

I don't worry about anything in the Internet age. I have been online since I was aware of it: 1985 in San Francisco. It has changed everything in my life. I would not want to even be alive in an era that did not have it because it is essential to our evolution as a species. — Augusten Burroughs

You are allowed to be alive. You are allowed to be somebody different. You are allowed to not say goodbye to anybody or explain a single thing to anyone, ever. — Augusten Burroughs

I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it. — Augusten Burroughs

Life Lessons by Augusten Burroughs

1. Augusten Burroughs teaches us that it is possible to overcome even the most difficult of obstacles and to find hope and joy in life, no matter how dark and difficult the journey may be.
2. He also shows us that it is possible to find strength in our own stories, and to use our experiences to help others.
3. Lastly, Burroughs demonstrates the power of resilience and the importance of being true to oneself, no matter the cost.