Augusten Burroughs
Freshly brainwashed from rehab, I carry the bottle into the bathroom. I hold it up to the light. See the pretty bottle? Isn't it beautiful? Yes, it's beautiful. I unscrew the cap and pour it into the toilet. I flush twice. And then I think, why did I flush twice? The answer, is of course, because I truly do know myself. I cannot be sure I won't attempt to drink from the toilet, like a dog.Collection: Beautiful
I missed him so much that I had physical sensations of loss, all over my body. Like one minute I was missing an arm, the next my spleen. It was making me feel sick, like throwing up.Collection: Loss
Women smirk at baldness. How adorable would they find it if they began to lose their breasts in their late twenties? If both tits just shrunk up - unevenly I might add - and eventually turned into wine-cork nubs. Then it would be a different story. Then men would get the pity that they deserve. As far as I'm concerned, baldness is the male breast cancer only worse, because almost everyone gets it. True, it's not life threatening. Just social-life threatening. But in New York City, there is no difference.Collection: New York
It was like living in a new house. I saw the undersides of tables, walked through the tangle of chair legs. It would be good to be a dog, I thought. You would feel safe surrounded by all of these leggy objects that never tried to run away.Collection: Running
As I sat in the hot, salty water, I thought, 'No wonder Mr. Bubble always gives me a urinary tract infection and hives.' Mr. Bubble was for common people. Mr. Bubble was for my so-called brother, their true child. I was a Vanderbilt. I should bathe in condiments and seasonings.Collection: Brother
Never work with children, puppies or bulimics.Collection: Children
Everybody in recovery smokes. If you don't like smoking, don't even bother trying to get sober. Just stay drunk.Collection: Recovery
My instinct was always have your gun in your hand. Especially when you are telling somebody to do something. But, in fact, the police academy discourages this. They feel your gun should rarely, if ever, be brought out of its holster. Most certainly not when children are involved, which is exactly when I saw myself using my gun most often. A truant teenager loitering outside a movie theater is going to be far more motivated to return to school when he has the barrel of a .45 pressed against his cheek.Collection: Children
Maybe it was a Patty Hearst thing. Stockholm syndrome or whatever it's called when you're being held against your will but then you become sucked in and fall in love. Or if not exactly love, you fall into something you can't see out of. 'I can't shoot a machine gun' becomes 'Hey, this hardly has any kick-back!Collection: Falling In Love
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.Collection: Writing
I did not consider him to be any kind of a genius. I considered him deeply lacking in the area that mattered most in life. Star quality.Collection: Stars
Fact: upon locking yourself our of your apartment you will immediately need to use the bathroom. Fact: and then you will stand in place and watch your door. You will just stare. As though rebuffed by it. As though it has done this to you.Collection: Doors
You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.Collection: Past
I came to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren’t alone. Maybe God was simply that part of yourself that was always there and always strong, even when you were not.Collection: Strong
It was a salad bar of phobiasCollection: Bars
I was like a packet of powdered Sea Monkeys and they were like water.Collection: Sea
I was struck with a bolt of distilled horror like I have never known before. Far worse than suddenly finding yourself walking through a prison cafeteria wearing Daisy Duke shorts and a Jane Fonda headband.Collection: Finding Yourself
I never question the way I write. Writing is the only thing that's without seams for me. It's an effort to talk because my pictures have to be turned into these sounds. It's an effort to be alive. It's work. But writing is wonderful.Collection: Writing
I'm grateful for a lot of things. One is not being a drunk wreck. Or losing all four limbs in some ridiculous East Village bus accident that I was so destined for.Collection: Grateful
The most mortifying fact of my life is something that happened when I was fourteen and I have never admitted to anyone: not to friends nor therapists; not even in rehab when we were detailing our own personal spirals of shame did I confess. It is this: I am a graduate of the Barbizon School of Modeling.Collection: School
My window fogs and this makes me feel like there is no world outside of the car.Collection: Fog
Perfection is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If you are a perfectionist, at least stop telling everybody you're one and try to get over it yourself, alone in your home with the lights offCollection: Home
[Christmas] holidays are a heavy, heavy time. We make light of them with our red and green and our stockings and candy canes, but people think heavy thoughts over the holidays because that's when you're thinking about family. Are we close? Or are we not as close as other people?Collection: Holiday
Dennis looked at the puppy in the window. We both did. It was the oddest thing. Normally, puppies in pet store windows sleep or pee or roll around on top of other dogs. This one ignored us its window-mates and was instead sitting with its nose pressed against the glass, looking at us with an extremely serious little expression on its face. An expression that seemed to me to be saying, "I am a sacred cow. Get out your wallet.Collection: Dog
There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.Collection: Writing
And of course, the answer came to me in the same way Jesus comes to those who drink in trailers: as an epiphany.Collection: Jesus
The most valuable moments and experiences that life has to offer are found only along its most treacherous paths.Collection: Path
I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness.Collection: Numbness
Sometimes when you work in advertising you'll get a product that's really garbage and you have to make it seem fantastic, something that is essential to the continued quality of life.Collection: Quality
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.Collection: Eye
Applause is a constant thing in AA. It's how we buy drinks for each other.Collection: Drink
He was raised without a proper diagnosis.Collection: Diagnosis
I sit there and think how it isn't fair that I can't drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinking into a decade of hard-core drinking and that is why. I blew my wad.Collection: Drinking
For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray [sic] days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks - accidentally - and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you're alive.Collection: Suicide
Decisions are beautiful. They are the evidence of thought and care. Decisions are the polishing cloths of life.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Eye
...handsome people are always interesting to watch. But a handsome person in crisis is riveting.Collection: People
Like every child, I adored her. Until I formed a brain and got to know her.Collection: Children
I feel like they are two different things, and when I write books, they're just books. If they can be movies that's okay. But I would write a novel that couldn't be a film.Collection: Book
A lot of people can be afraid of the masking because people can misrepresent themselves [in the Internet] and they can pose as people they're not. Well, yeah; that's true. That's one side of it. But the other side of it is that it equalizes you and if you happen to be a person who is not equal in the eyes of the greater society that's a damn good thing.Collection: Eye
I suppose home is, for me, more of a state of mind. It's really more of about being where I want to be with people I care about.Collection: Home
I read a lot of science books - I love cosmology, quantum theory, particle physics. So my idea of a great read would probably put you directly into a coma.Collection: Book
In general, advertising isn't a "creative" atmosphere. It's a business atmosphere and your job is puzzle solving. My favorite aspect of the business, I guess, was presenting to clients. What I enjoyed least were the clients. Worried corporate brand managers, trying to dumb-down their ads for the stupid American population. I hated the disrespect that these people had for "consumers."Collection: Jobs
I don't think writers - in general - ever achieve the fame of movie stars. For the simple reason that only a fraction of the population reads. But I guess there are exceptions.Collection: Stars
I tend to really enjoy being swept up in fiction. I love a good story and I admire fiction authors.Collection: Fiction
I don't worry about anything in the Internet age. I have been online since I was aware of it: 1985 in San Francisco. It has changed everything in my life. I would not want to even be alive in an era that did not have it because it is essential to our evolution as a species.Collection: San Francisco
The most important thing for a writer to do is to write. It really doesn't matter what you write as long as you are able to write fluidly, very quickly, very effortlessly. It needs to become not second nature but really first nature to you. And read; you need to read and you need to read excellent books and then some bad books. Not as many bad books, but some bad books, so that you can see what both look like and why both are what they are.Collection: Book
What I think of blogs is just this: Some are beautifully written and many are not. But even blogs that aren't necessarily "well" written are great for the person writing them.Collection: Writing
I could write another collection of personal essays from what has happened to me in the last year alone. I don't seek out my material - it finds me. I am magnetic, somehow.Collection: Writing