571 Quotes by Augusten Burroughs

You see, even though back when I was drinking I thought nothing bad ever happened to me, something did. Time passed. A lot of time passed. In bars, at parties with people I didn’t care for. It was always the drink. It wasn’t about love or reading the Sunday paper in bed. Or housebreaking a puppy. Or anything that people call ‘life.’ It was about drinking. So actually, something bad, very bad, did happen to me. I wasted my life. And now, what little I have left, I want.

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

All I know for sure is that I have accidentally fallen through a wormhole in the universe and stumbled into someone else’s grim life.

Tracy, the leader of the CDH group, looks at me with eyes that seem to belong to someone three times her age. It’s something beyond wisdom, all the way to insanity and back. It’s like her eyes are scarred from all the things she’s seen.

My mother began to go crazy. Not in a ‘Let’s paint the kitchen red!’ sort of way. But crazy in a ‘gas oven, toothpaste sandwhich, I am God’ sort of way.

The shame is disguised here as helpful. But both people in this conversation would know it was bullying.

I said all the wrong things. Except when I was busy saying all the mean ones and in the end I hated everybody and everything.

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

You should know, I tried for many years not to be in love with you, but I failed. And I really did try very hard. But it was not possible, and it never has been, because I have actually loved you from very early in our relationship. Possibly as early as our first meeting.