571 Quotes by Augusten Burroughs

I can almost never say what I’m thinking at any given moment. I would have been stabbed to death years ago.

There is nothing about MYSELF that I wouldn’t reveal or write about. I don’t care how horrendous or ridiculous I may appear in person or in print. There is great freedom in not caring what other people think.

I don’t have a fixed routine. I write every day but I don’t “write” every day, if that makes any sense. In other words, I email with my friends constantly and sometimes I’ll pull out something I’ve written and save it.

Pain is interesting. I dislike it immensely but I’ve never experienced pain and boredom at the same time. Even when I had unending and severe pain in my lower back for several years I was never bored by the pain, though it exhausted me.

That I wrote six books about my past is the red herring; nothing I have written has in any way altered the past or healed me clean, so no scar remains. Perhaps the process of writing – being fully in the moment, while I write letter by letter – has soothed me because it’s kept me busy. When you’re busy, you lack the time to fondle your emotional baggage. And if that sounds too reductive, remember we crawled from the swamp. Simple isn’t such a terrible thing to be in this respect.

The calcium in your bones came from a star. We are all made from recycle bits and pieces of the universe. This matters because origins matter.

Shame is the landfill emotion. It’s not organic, like joy. It was dumped there by somebody else.

It is an awful, just sickening feeling, I discovered, to live with somebody, to exist in the midst of sharing a life, only to realize it is utterly doomed. It was botulism of the soul. I’d had such ambition for building a life together, because I wanted that strength of character and security. But I had overlooked the most important thing: he wasn’t right for me. I wasn’t right for him. Merely wanting us to be right and good together wasn’t enough.

Freedom was what we had. Nobody told us when to go to bed. Nobody told us to do our homework. Nobody told us we couldn’t drink two six-packs of Budweiser and then throw up in the Maytag.