Quotes from 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.

I hate when you play therapist. Especially with your accent. It makes everything you say sound so BBC.

I realized I could do anything to him and he would never hate me. I could never drive him away, spoil things between us, or otherwise sour things in his eyes, because he already knew how horrible I could be, yet he loved me, anyway.

So if you think the job really suits you, be you.

This is what happens when you go against the grain of truth: you get splinters later on.

What's painful and wonderful about loving somebody is loving their small things, like the way he is able to smile when he sips his wine, the way his hands fall down at his sides, fingers slightly cupped, or the way he is conducting the orchestra on the radio. Or now, the way he is lighting candles, just now this one in front of me. This is the one he lit first, actually. The one in front of me. Even though there was one on the way, he passed that one, lit it next.

You know, American alcoholics are pretty fucking hard to insult.

When you say, "I need more confidence," what you're really saying is, "I need those people over there to approve of me." That is the desire to control other people and what they think.

And that was my first clue that Dennis was of superior mental health. He had no reason to try and mask his awkwardness with a stoic face, no need to pretend to be blasé.

The truth is that life itself is brutally, obscenely unfair. Consider all those other millions of sperm cells that were just as good as the one that resulted in you, and where are they now? Dead, nowhere.

A big, friendly-looking man approaches me. "Hey, I'm Bobby," he says with a thick Baltimore accent, "… and I'm an alcoholic.

The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We

There is helium in his tone of voice, a lightness that means mischief.

Dutch isn't easy for the outsider to learn, because it's spoken from the back of the throat at the trigger spot for the gag reflex. In order to make the correct sounds, you have to have quite a bit of phlegm at the ready, which is probably why everybody smokes. Nonsmokers can't even understand Dutch, let alone speak a single word of it. The

I absolutely hate being strapped down and buckled to my own words.

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

We can continue to live exactly as we do right now, in a heavy lidded state of love and unspeakable compromise. Isn't that what people do? Every day? Don't they ache but rename it tired?

Books are like that. Books just are. Sometimes books need to be, they need to exist and so they will body-snatch a writer and climb out through the writer's fingers and into the world where they belong to different people to different degrees and for different reasons.

Scars are nothing to hate, they are nothing to deny. They serve as our proof of what we've survived, and there is nothing more beautiful than to have survived something.

It does not matter whether or not those responsible for harming you ever understand what they did, care about what they did, or apologize for it. It does not matter. All that matters is your ability to stop fondling the experience with your brain. Which you can do right now. A good therapist can help by preventing you from spending time wallowing in the past and instead focus on organizing your future.

It's amazing how drunk you can be without alcohol.

I just want to go kayaking in the Florida Keys, get a black lab, grow tomatoes, have a life.

Exactly! What you are doing is 'telling on your addict.

You can't move away from your addiction, it will follow you wherever you go.