571 Quotes by Augusten Burroughs

What I like about you is that I’ve never met anybody like you in my life. You’ve got depth and you’re funny and you have a sweet, good soul.” A breeze from the water passes over us, “And I admire your strength.

I read The Old Man and the Sea but my eyelids bled from the toothpicks that I used to keep them open.

So that’s what I’m here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand 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 have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green.

There is a complexity to life that I often overlook. There is a depth of thinking, there is a richness. I am skating on the surface.

A tear wells in his eye. It wells and then spills down his cheek. And despite being pumped with booze and coke, I can read that one eye as clearly as a billboard for cigarettes. Only instead of saying Alive with Pleasure it says, I Have to Go Now.

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.

The truth behind the truth is this: 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.

I understood, I need to write. Live here, in my words, and my head. I need to go inside, that’s all. No big, complicated, difficult thing. I just need to go in reverse.

While there are some things from which you never heal, so be it. The truth about healing is that you don’t need to heal to be whole.