"I was like a packet of powdered Sea Monkeys and they were like water."
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Quote collection
Augusten Burroughs quotes (page 6 of 13)
248 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It was a salad bar of phobias"
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"You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind."
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"I've just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I'm now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father."
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"And I tend to listen to NPR when I'm not writing."
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"But my favorite band is Curbside Life, out of Chicago."
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"The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work."
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"I'm like the guy who prepares your taxes or a dentist. I'm very conservative and boring in a lot of ways."
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"As a child, I was never drawn toward depraved or extreme situations; I really wanted a normal little childhood. Unfortunately, that's just not what happened."
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"My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron."
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"I think people tend to see the bigger point, which is maybe not fitting in and feeling like you didn't have the childhood that you expected you would have, or that you felt lonely or struggled with drugs and alcohol or just that you were able to achieve your dreams."
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"No matter what I've written, someone somewhere has come up to me and said, "Me too." The truth can be offensive, but it's always nourishing, in a way. You recognize it. You can feel it. And even if [readers] think, "My god, I would never get in those situations," within those ridiculous circumstances that I have created for myself, they know the way I respond is probably what they would do too."
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"I remember, no matter how impossible it seemed that any given day would end, it always did. This one would, too."
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"Even painfully shy and awkward people are not painfully shy or awkward when they are alone. The way to access this natural, comfortable alone-self when you are with others is by choosing to forbid yourself to wonder what "they" are thinking. Instead, force yourself to exist in the instant, then take it- and give it- as it comes."
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"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!"
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"Never work with children, puppies or bulimics."
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"Everybody in recovery smokes. If you don't like smoking, don't even bother trying to get sober. Just stay drunk."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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