Quotes from Augusten Burroughs

When Group is over, we all pile into the same elevator and nobody says a word. That's the strange thing about elevators, it's like they have this power to silence you. I've just been in group therapy where people will reveal the most intimate details of their lives to complete strangers, yet in the elevator nobody can say a word.

I think out of seven billion people, there is probably more than just one soul mate. Surely, the paid employee in charge of each person's love life has taken into account the possibility of fatal snake bites and heavy falling objects.

I felt ignorant, self-deprived, incredibly isolated, deeply and profoundly lonely and missing people, absolutely starved for affection, physically weary from alcohol, very depressed about my physical appearance, my weak muscles. Hurt and angry and sad

I can no longer read a magazine and throw it on the floor. In exchange, I get unlimited access to the one person I have met in my life whom I automatically felt was out of my league. My favorite human being, the single person I cherish above all others. This is the person I get to share the oxygen in the room with.

Memorization is not the same as remembering.

Dennis asked, "Do you enjoy jazz? Because I love it, and I know of a place downtown where we could go." "And then we can have broken glass and arsenic for dinner!" I felt like replying, because I barely tolerated jazz when I encountered it in elevators or dental offices. But I considered that when you meet somebody who really loves something, the high-road thing to do is to try to love it, too, so I wrote back, "That sounds great!

If you loathe your job, the situation is improved if you can do it in your underwear. Drunk. *

Six hours later, when I returned, I was greeted at the door- and this before it was even opened -by the overpowering smell of vinegar. What were my neighbors thinking? That a douche-obsessed woman with a gigantic, three-foot vagina lived next door?

Shame is the landfill emotion. It's not organic, like joy. It was dumped there by somebody else.

Avoid self-pity by taking responsibility for everything that happens to you, even if somebody else is at fault. By taking responsibility, I don't mean play doormat. I mean, repair yourself. Move forward. Move on. Then, only then, see if you can wrangle some empathy.

Put another way, to be more confident you need to give a whole lot less of a shit about what other people think of you. Confidence is not something you feel or possess; it's something others use to describe what they see when they look at you.

Usually, they started with just two people bickering over something small. Like what to watch on TV. Then a third person would enter the room and see two people screaming over the TV and they'd decide to moderate, only they'd end up taking a side. Eventually, someone else would get sucked in.

It was time to leave. He was insufferable, had toilet problems, looked demented to begin with, and now he was the accomplice to a cat killer. Yet did I leave? No, I sat there. And I thought, What has happened to me? Why am I not rising up off the sofa? Why am I not leaving?

Normal people hadn't been molested or reared by a clinically psychotic mother, an alcoholic father, or a perversely mad psychiatrist who wore a Santa hat and performed toilet bowl readings. These were normal people, and I lived among them now. I thought, This must be what I want.

No matter how awful something is, you can always sell tickets.

Because the minister's wife refused to leave the minister, and because my mother required a worshipful companion, she was forced to break up with Fern and secure herself a new mate. As luck would have it, Dr. Finch had recently begun seeing a suicidal eighteen-year-old African-American girl who had taken a leave of absence from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her name was Dorothy.

Didn't every new thing you did become a part of you, one of your bricks?

Sometimes, I wrap aluminum foil around Cream's middle, around her legs and her tail and then I walk her through the house on a leash. I like it when she's shiny, like a star, like a guest on the Donnie and Marie Show.

The thing is, I wouldn't believe in them, and I would privately ridicule any idiot who did, except for one thing: I am a witch.

The Anti-christ of mental health and emotional maturity.

He sees the shit that happens around me - or because of me - so now he is only 99.99 percent certain I can't turn him into a frog.

And possibility was my fuel. It was the One Thing that prevented me from slitting my wrists on any given horrid day. The fact that at any moment, everything could change.

I'm tired of living in the shallow end of the pool.

Now he was the dish of wrapped peppermints next to the cash register that I didn't want because they were free. Because