Augusten Burroughs

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The only other people who have had experiences similar to those of this man were locked up inside institutions for the criminally insane. The difference is, this guy gets business cards.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Men
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Real optimism is not the pep talk you give yourself. It is earned through the labor involved in emotional housekeeping.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Real
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If I were a serial killer, I would not be the kind that stabs and then eats the victim. I would be the kind that hides in a tree and shoots at the aerobics class.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Class
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I don't believe in the concept of a soul mate. Because we are all unique, but we're also simply too similar.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Believe
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I couldn't help but think, This car is taking me to a mental hospital and my mother is treating it like open-mic night at a Greenwich Village café.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Mother
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Even when we lose an arm or a leg, there's not less of us but more. Human experience weighs more than human tissue.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Tissues
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Nobody's trying to kill you, Deirdre. You're killing yourself.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Trying
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My brother was born without taste or the desire to be professionally lit.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Brother
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Thanksgiving was nothing more than a pilgrim-created obstacle in the way of Christmas; a dead bird in the street that forced a brief detour.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Christmas
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In the opening to the Mary Tyler Moore Show Mary's in the supermarket, hurrying through the aisles. She pauses at the meat case, picks up a steak and checks the price. Then rolls her eyes, shrugs and tosses it in the cart. That's kind of how I feel. Sure I would have liked things to be different. But, 'roll of eyes' what can you do? 'shrug' I threw the meat in my cart and moved on.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Eye
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All of us are richer and more fascinating and more complex than we can ever know.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Knows
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I realized I could really become hooked on these happy pills. They gave me a glorious feeling of general well-being and didn't make me fat, like alcohol. I wondered if there was any harm in being addicted to only these.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Alcohol
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There's not enough of me left over.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Enough
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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.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Loss
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People generally like happy endings, which is something I learned from my years in advertising. I like happy endings myself, but only if they're honest. I'm just as happy with a terrible, hopeless ending.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Years
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It terrified me to consider: What if, as a grown-up, I craved another body beside me as still as this one? What then?
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: What If
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You have an incredible body." He reaches out to touch my stomach. I feel no pleasure in his compliment or his touch, only impatience. This is the only feeling. I feel like the paper on which my mood chart is printed.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Feelings
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I never get sick of writing my own stories because there's a certain comfort in knowing you will never run out of material. It's relaxing, actually, to write.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Running
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While I liked hamsters, too, the Habitrail cage was expensive. Even I could see that the interconnecting boxes, tubes, and spheres could easily bankrupt a family and lead to addiction later in life. Because, how would you know when to stop? How could you stop? An entire city could be built with a Habitrail.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Later In Life
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I knew that he was as reliable as a mathematical formula.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Mathematical
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He's a really nice guy, if only I weren't me.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Nice
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What I really want is to sit next to someone under an L.L. bean blanket on the beach in the fall and drink coffee from the same mug. I don't want some rusty '73 Ford Pinto with a factory-defective gas tank that causes it to explode when it's rear-ended in the parking lot of the supermarket. So why do I keep looking for Pintos?
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Beach
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The problem with not having anybody to tell you what to do, I understood, is that there was nobody to tell you what not to do.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Problem
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If you find you require willpower, you aren't ready to lose weight.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Weight Loss
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and she's a nurse. do you know how hard nursing school is? it's like medical school. so she's obviously smart.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Smart
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We were young. We were bored. And the old electroshock therapy machine was just under the stairs in a box next to the Hoover.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Bored
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The dark side of blogging is, of course, people can be (and are) just savage and uncivilized, deeply cruel and fully unaccountable.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Dark
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It's weird - sort of not terribly wise - to take a book that was successful and then change its cover.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Wise
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My subconscious does the writing; I don't have control over that.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Writing
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You can make almost anything a learning or positive experience. I think I offer a good example of how to make the most out of what life gives you and how to keep moving on.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Moving
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I don't read memoirs. But if you write a memoir, I would think you'd want people to know, "O.K., look, I've taken some liberties here." It's just a matter of being open with your readers.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Taken
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Writing has enriched my life in ways I never imaged.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Writing
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I always tried to learn Greek, but all I got out of it was, "poulaki mou." ["My little chicken."]
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Greek
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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.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Writing
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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.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Writing
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I don't sit down at nine in the morning and begin writing and then take a break for lunch and stop at four. I have no structure like that. I am at my computer constantly, more or less attached to it. I live on-line and hate being off-line and don't care how unhealthy it is.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Morning
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The thing for someone just starting off [in writing] is to write. You need to have limber fingers, whether you write with your fingers or you type on your laptop, but you need to have a limber mind and you need to be able to write without judging what you've written, at least right away, and without editing right away.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Writing
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If I were blind I'd rather have another blind person leading me around because they know what I'm dealing with and they're experiencing the same things.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Blind
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I'm not going to waste my energy looking into the eyes of someone like the guy who blew my legs off trying to find a way to forgive him for doing something that horrible when there are way more productive ways I could be spending my life. You've got to focus on moving on.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Moving
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I've overcome a lot - sexual abuse, death of a loved one, bad parents and experienced life. My nature is such I not only survived all this but I have thrived. I've always been psychologically ambitious in that I've never been willing to settle emotionally for anything less then what's needed. I've wanted more then that from life.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Death Of A Loved One
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I've learned how to turn the adversities in my life into enriching experiences. You can actually gain a lot from adversities and they make you the person you are today.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Adversity
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When I first thought of being a writer I had visions of stacks of books in stores with my name on them, that sort of thing. But I never imagined this would be the reaction.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Book
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I'm always prepared for the worst.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Worst
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I think people might think, oh, I don't want to approach the big famous author because it's embarrassing, but then they think for two seconds about it and realize, this is, like, a toilet bowl reader.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Thinking
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New York City is a place where you can lock yourself up in your little studio apartment, and not go outside at all, and not feel in the slightest guilty about it.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: New York
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There's a lot about being "A Writer" that has nothing to do with writing. That's one thing I've discovered. You've got to meet with the sales force, and you've got to have all these luncheons, and be gracious, and you've got to give a lot of presentations and you've got to give a lot of speeches, and you've got to be on tour.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Writing
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A lot of being a writer doesn't have anything to do with writing. It's ironic - I have to squeeze the books in, even though that's what it's all about.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Book
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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.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: College
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I never could have written the screenplay because I would have been forced to learn new software and I can't learn one more thing.
- Augusten Burroughs
Collection: Software