Quotes from Augusten Burroughs

We tried to do everything right, now we were forced to do everything wrong and it was working.

Dennis is the person who organizes everything in our lives. To the casual outsider, it would seem grossly unfair. He owns a company, he handles all our money, he manages our lives. While I sit and write, Dennis does everything else. When I try to accept additional responsibilities, I make a mess and he has to fix whatever I broke.

for me it provided a kaleidoscopic view of everything that was wrong with me. I could already feel it opening all the windows in my head, giving me a panoramic view of my flaws

I made very good money and spent all of it every week. I lived paycheck to paycheck...

even if you are a victim, you must never be a victim. Even if you deserve to be one. Because while you wait for somebody to come along and set things right, life has moved forward without you.

Oh my God, I think. I envy people who are so easygoing, but I also don't understand them at all.

here." This sounds fine with me, I like the idea of seeing a shrink once a week as maintenance. It's another chance to talk about myself without being interrupted. Plus, a shrink doesn't really know me, so I can present a more balanced picture of who I really am.

As charming as the room was, I knew it wouldn't work for me. I do not need charming. I need to be online, at all times. I need surge protection.

Being busy is not the same as being focused. Being focused means being here.

My goal was to get through the day as fast as possible. I worked fast because I wanted to be done. I wanted to be done because I wanted to go home to my nest and drink.

You know, sometimes just giving yourself permission to feel any emotion without judgment or censorship can lessen the intensity of those negative emotions.

This is the right house and the right life, but it's weird because I've never had a home before; I've had addresses.

We did not pass one other Mercury Merkur XR4Ti the entire way.

Do you understand that you are exactly attractive enough and thin enough (even if you weight four hundred pounds) and smart enough and funny enough, even if you cannot tell a knock knock joke without fucking it up? You are exactly everything enough to the person who thinks you are

I came to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren't alone.

would like to chop you up into small, manageable pieces and grill you on a hibachi, then feed you to my shar-pei. But all that comes out is Welcome to moviefone!

Where this healthy self-empathy turns into a malignant self-pity is at the arrival of resentment. "Fuck everybody. Nobody gives a shit about me. Fuck them all." That is self-pity and it is dangerous because it signals a lack of accountability for one's mental state and, worse, the outcome of one's life.

And we were married and all the windows were open but the smell of flowers was so thick and sickly sweet. I felt like I might choke to death.

In preschool, when somebody hurts us, the teacher sees to it that the person who hurt us apologizes. It is ingrained in us from a very early age that inflicted pain or wrongdoing or unfairness should and will be corrected. Note the passive phrasing: "be corrected." We will not, as children, take control and make sure these amends are delivered in a timely fashion.

Therapy could be of tremendous benefit to "getting over" one's past if the therapy is focused on specific ways to stop submitting to the temptation to obsess. Many people with difficult histories carry these histories with them, burnishing the past with each retelling.

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.

We never sampled our drugs because we were afraid of them, but to admit it aloud would have broken the spell.

What little factual information I absorbed in my life was gleaned from lectures the Professor gave to Gilligan. For

We had a wealth of something we didn't want, but the wealth itself was intoxicating and we invented games, just so we could experience the sensation of having too much of something.