Quotes from Augusten Burroughs

My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron.

The new boyfriend) knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I'm writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I'm an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other 16.

It was not uncommon to walk in the door of their home and find my mother sitting on the sofa reading over a manuscript with shampoo horns sculpted into her hair. Anne Sexton's voice would be blasting from the speakers. A woman who writes feels too much...

Most everybody had made at least one bad, drunken decision in their lives. Called an ex at two in the morning. Or perhaps has a little too much to drink on a second date and wept inconsolably while revealing how simply damaged one was, while nonetheless retaining an uncommonly large capacity for love. That kind of thing was, while regrettable, at least comprehensible. But waking up with someone generationally inappropriate, like your grandfather's best buddy?

I remember, no matter how impossible it seemed that any given day would end, it always did. This one would, too.

You have an incredible body. He reaches out to touch my stomach. I feel no pleasure in his compliment or his touch, only impatience. This is the only feeling. I feel like the paper on which my mood chart is printed.

No matter your spiritual beliefs, if you hold any, the answer is the same: sometimes, why is not knowable. If you open the refrigerator door and a tub of Kozy Shack tapioca pudding tumbles out and splats open onto the floor, you clean it. You don't stand there and question why it happened, how it was possible. Why doesn't matter now.

but I am not here ironically; I am here sincerely.

I know now: what is is all that matters. Not the thing you know is meant to be, not what could be, not what should be, not what ought to be, not what once was. Only the is.

Although my parents never attended church or mentioned Jesus except when they screamed at each other—and then they used his full name, 'Jesus Fucking Christ

I loved most when his eyelashes twitched and he blinked, and suddenly happiness was there inside his eyes. Unmistakable. Like a single word printed on a clean white page.

You are allowed to be alive. You are allowed to be somebody different. You are allowed to not say goodbye to anybody or explain a single thing to anyone, ever.

The most valuable moments and experiences that life has to offer are found only along its most treacherous paths.

I don't believe in the concept of a soul mate. Because we are all unique, but we're also simply too similar.

Nobody's trying to kill you, Deirdre. You're killing yourself.

look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it

If we happened to be in rehearsal downstairs in my room and a neighbor padded across the lawn to rap gently on the window and ask us to please be more quiet, Natalie might simply lift up her skirt and mash her vagina against the window while extending her middle finger.

Most of us have love in our lives. Most of us love other people are are ourselves loved by others. But make no mistake: you are alone in the world. You were born alone, even if you were born conjoined. And you die alone, unable to bring a single person with you.

My brother was born without taste or the desire to be professionally lit.

Time moves only forward, never back. We look forward to a moment and then it arrives and an instant later it is gone. Like something on the surface of a river that we reached for but did not touch in time and it carried on, away. You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.

Suddenly, this word fills me with a sense of sadness I haven't felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds are all dried up and the plants are wilted. It's no longer really summer but the air is still too warm and heavy to be fall. It's the season between seasons. It's the feeling of something dying.

Because all of us are made not only of what we have but what we lost. And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition.

Never, ever try to impress somebody. Be exactly the person you would be if you were alone or with somebody it was safe to fart around. Be that person. Be the person you are right now, alone, reading this book. And then meet people. Then hold out until you meet somebody who is utterly impressed. Because then? You will not have impressed them. They will have been impressed by you.

The only other people who have had experiences similar to those of this man were locked up inside institutions for the criminally insane. The difference is, this guy gets business cards.