Quotes from Augusten Burroughs

In addition to calling each other standard names like bitch and whore, the Finches incorporated Freud's stages of psychosexual development into their arsenal of invectives.

It then occurs to me that I am mentally unstable. So I decided to close my office door and go online. Maybe I can do some research and find out what's wrong with my personality and then fix it.

In AA, you are brainwashed into believing that all the good stuff happens only after you stop drinking. Clearly they are lying; my life improved significantly as soon as I ordered a cocktail.

See, alcoholism is exactly like bubble gum. You know when you blow a bubble and it bursts, some of the gum sticks to you chin? What's the only thing that gets the bubble gum off your chin? Bubble gum. You have to take the bubble gum out of your mouth and press it against the gum on your chin and it'll pick it up. Only an alcoholic can treat another alcoholic. Only other alcoholics can get you sober.

He was furious that the music house wanted forty grand. He wanted us to Jew them down

If you hate life, you haven't seen enough of it. If you hate your life, it's because your life is too small and doesn't fit you.

It's not that I was an outright nitwit of a child. It's that the things even a nitwit could do with little or no instruction often confused me.

The person who loses their ability to walk will care more about the brownies than about the walking. Because if they have lost the ability to walk, they have accepted the loss. Walking was then, brownies are now. You would be amazed by what you can give up, lose, or break and yet still be a person who gets happy over brownies. It only seems like I am kidding.

SEEING THE TRUTH MEANS looking at everything for the first time, every time.

I'm an alcoholic who doesn't (and doesn't want to) drink anymore so I exist in a state of never-ending micro-addictions that reveal themselves in the form of obsessions.

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

Regret can power your telescope, changing what you see.

If you fall out of love, remember the love and not the fall.

A body in motion tends to stay in motion. (reebok,chiat/day.)Just do it. (Nike, Weiden and Kennedy.)Dammit something just isn't right. (Me, to my bathroom mirror at four thirty in the morning when I'm plastered.)

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.

Olives are the wishbones of the cocktail world; rarely are they freely passed along to somebody else.

I could see jabs from his flashlight cutting into the woods on either side of me. He was back there, somewhere. The light beam was like a knife and I didn't want it on my back.

I steered my lips across his jawline and to his mouth. I kissed him. These were open-mouth kisses, young people's kisses, hungry and full at the same time, in love, at home.

Feeling like you cannot stand one more minute doesn't mean you can't. You can, actually. It's incredibly easy to stop smoking. And it's horrifically uncomfortable. Then not quite horrifically uncomfortable. Then it's damn uncomfortable. Then it's uncomfortable. Then it's not as uncomfortable as it was at first. Then it's not so bad. And then you don't smoke anymore. And you don't miss it.

This is what I'm saying: you hate your life. But you don't know what life is. Life is too huge for you to possibly hate. If you hate life, you haven't seen enough of it. If you hate your life, it's because your life is too small and doesn't fit you. However big you think your life is, it's nothing compared to what's out there.

There are times in life when logic and reason and probability must be recognized, but then ignored.

When your psychiatrist forgets to look at the clock and is hanging on your every word, that's when you know, out of all his patients, you are the sickest. He

While there are some things from which you never heal, so be it. The truth about healing is that you don't need to heal to be whole.

Loss creates a greater overall surface area within a person. You expand as a result of it. Though it may very well feel like the opposite.