571 Quotes by Augusten Burroughs

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.

I thought, I can’t do advertising any more, so I was downloading all these PDF applications from community colleges. And I thought, I’ll become a paramedic. I’ll get a two-year associate degree, if I can get in.

If you don’t like smoking don’t even bother getting sober, just stay drunk.

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. I.

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.

Red hair is great. It’s rare, and therefore superior.

With my own memoirs, they are truthful, and I write everything fully expecting to some day end up televised on Court TV, and I’m fully prepared to be challenged legally on it. Everything I write is the truth and I know that I would win.

After a horribly long day, I needed a mental break. I threw on my parka, with the raccoon fur around the hood, and I went to see a movie. But what to see? Something sweet and stupid and harmless. At the movie theater on Second Avenue and Twelfth, a title caught my eye. I thought, ‘That seems good. Jodie Foster and a puffy, friendly farm animal, a butterfly.’ I unzipped my jacket and headed inside to see a movie I’d heard the name of but knew nothing about. It was called Silence Of The Lambs.

So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography – and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.