Quotes from Augusten Burroughs

I understand why sometimes people speak in cliches because sometimes there is no other way to describe something.

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

This is the truest thing I know. Scars are nothing to hate, they are nothing to deny. They serve as our proof of what we survived, and there is nothing more beautiful than to have survived something.

One thing was certain: I would be in their Tang commercial. And if any of the other children tried to get in the way, I would use my pencil to blind them

A lack of "self-esteem" really suggests a feeling of shame over being one's self. Shame is the landfill emotion. It's not organic, like joy. It was dumped there by somebody else. A manipulation. Shame is very heavy, dense disappointment; somebody else's, in you. Inside of disappointment is a deeper judgment: Less than. Inferior. Defective.

At that moment it would have been easier for me to spontaneously grasp quantum string theory

I felt absolutely nothing. It was like a door quickly opened, showing me what horrible feelings I had inside, and then slammed shut again so I wouldn't have to actually face them.

Because all of us are made not only of what we have but of what we lost. And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition. Even when we lose a leg or an arm, there's not less of us but more. Human experience weighs more than human tissue.

You weren't heavy at all...the only weight you carry is on your shoulders. I wish I could carry it for you.

Pain is interesting. I dislike it immensely but I've never experienced pain and boredom at the same time. Even when I had unending and severe pain in my lower back for several years I was never bored by the pain, though it exhausted me.

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.

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

Wanting to want something isn't the same as wanting it. I suppose what I really wanted, then, was to give more of a shit, because about certain things, I simply did not.

I mean, handsome people are always interesting to watch. But a handsome person in crisis is riveting.

Riding back from the grocery store, I realized my father was two men—one he presented to the outside world, and one, far darker, that was always there, behind the face everybody else saw. In my bedroom late that

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.

This is among the oldest, deepest, most primal truths: the facts of life may be, at times, unbearably painful. But the core, the bones of life are generous beyond all reason or belief. Those things that ought to kill us do not.

Adam had smiled at him and Max had smiled back. And then they both just stood there in that awkward silence that happens when two people are attracted to each other but don't know what to do about it because they are strangers.

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

In the middle of the conversation, I open a third ale. I cup my hand over the mouthpiece so they don't hear the tab of the ale being popped. It dawns on me that this is a slightly contrary action. Like stopping into Baby Gap before having an abortion.

She was a rare psychotic-confessional-poet strain of salmonella.

What I am certain of is that there's something wonky going on beneath the surface of what we call reality. Things are not as they appear. They are much, much more.

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

we were particles that came together to form into star after star after star until almost forever passed, and instead of a star what formed was life ... This is why for you, anything is possible. Because you are made of everything.