Alyssa > Alyssa's Quotes

“I remember, no matter how impossible it seemed that any given day would end, it always did. This one would, too.”
― Augusten Burroughs, You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

“All of us are richer and more fascinating and more complex than we can ever know.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't

“look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“I knew I had an ugly life. I knew I was lonely and I was scared. I thought something might be wrong with my father, wrong in the worst possible way. I believed he might contain a pathology of the mind--an emptiness--a knocking hollow where his soul should have been. But I also knew that one day, I would grow up. One day, I would be twenty, or thirty, or forty, even fifty and sixty and seventy and eighty and maybe even one hundred years old. And all those years were mine, they belonged to nobody but me. So even if I was unhappy now, it could all change tomorrow. Maybe I didn't even need to jump off the cliff to experience that kind of freedom. Maybe the fact that I knew such a freedom existed in the world meant that I could someday find it.
Maybe, I thought, I don't need a father to be happy. Maybe, what you get from a father you can get somewhere else, from somebody else, later. Or maybe you can just work around what's missing, build the house of your life over the hole that is there and always will be.”
― Augusten Burroughs, A Wolf at the Table

“Time moves only forward, never back.
We look forward to a moment and then it arrives and an instant later it is gone. Like something on the surface of a river that we reached for but did not touch in time and it carried on, away.
You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“You must hang onto the scraps of the bucking moment as if your sanity and life depended on it - because actually they do.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“Well, you know, just some old man all alone. God, I hope I don't end up alone like that. Some pathetic old woman with nobody to go on a whale watch with.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“Let the people who want to have kids, have them. And let the rest of us spend the extra money on ourselves. Being gay doesn’t make you a bad person. Not wanting kids doesn’t make you a bad person. Perhaps crushing the bones in one little girl’s hand makes you a bad person, but that was an accident.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Magical Thinking: True Stories

“I had the same worry that we wouldn't later be able to undo whatever it was we were doing to ourselves.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“Nothing surprises me now," I tell him. I am stoic. I am Joan of Arc, with liver damage and an unused penis.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Dry

“It was a salad bar of phobias”
― Augusten Burroughs

“My brother had very specific likes and dislikes. Basically, he liked anything until it harmed him and then he was wary.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“Happiness is a treadmill of a goal for people who are not happy by nature. Being an unhappy person does not mean you must be sad or dark. You can be interested instead of happy.”
― Augusten Burroughs

“Having one's mother or father or past abuser admit to their crimes or even apologize for them changes nothing--certainly not what they did. Rather, such an apology would give you the psychological permission to "move on" with your life.

But you do not need anybody's permisson to move on with your life.

It does not matter whether or not those responsible for harming you ever understand what they did, care about what they did, or apologize for it.

It does not matter.

All that matters is your ability to stop fondling the experience with your brain. Which you can do right now.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“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, Magical Thinking: True Stories

“Dorothy viewed my mother's propensity toward madness not as something to be afraid of, but rather as something to look forward to, like a movie or a newly released color of nail polish.

'Your mother is just expressing herself,' Dorothy would tell me when my mother stopped sleeping, started smoking the filters of her cigarettes and began writing backward with a glitter pen.

No, she's not,' I would say. 'She's going insane again.'

Don't be so mundane,' she would yawn, passing my mother a shoebox filled with cat vertebrae. 'She is a brilliant artist. If you want Hamburger Helper, go find some other mother.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“And then just as suddenly, I felt absolutely nothing. It was like a door quickly opened, showing me what horrible feelings I had inside, and then slammed shut again so I wouldn't have to actually face them. In many ways I felt I was living the life of a doctor in the ER. I was learning to block out all emotions in order to deal with the situation.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“eath, when it finally arrives, does so in a surprising fashion: it adds nothing to the room, not a light or a spark or a sound; death does not stir a molecule of the air. You know it arrives because there is suddenly a subtraction. You will feel it before you know it.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“There just didn't seem to be anything to hold on to. We weren't going anywhere, and we weren't pulling away. We were just floating, suspended in liquid. And I guess I want more. And I don't know what he wants.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Magical Thinking: True Stories

“I'm a sunflower with a cracked petal.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Sellevision

“You are allowed to be alive. You are allowed to be somebody different. You are allowed to not say goodbye to anybody or explain a single thing to anyone, ever.”
― Augusten Burroughs

“And as soon as I thought this, I tried to think of something else quickly. Because we were so close that I felt sometimes like she could read my mind.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“I understand why sometimes people speak in cliches because sometimes there is no other way to describe something.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Magical Thinking: True Stories

“But I think I would have been happier if the only thing that came out of his mouth was the sound of a turning page.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“No wonder I had found that woman so offensive. Sometimes things feel that bad. Sometimes you just feel like shit.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't

“I want to write something that means something to someone...the reminds them of what a second, a moment, really is...or that assures them that we are just as lost as they are. I want to write an emotion they are too fragile to let loose, so that my words can do the expression for them, the feeling for them. I want to write beyond the basics and the cliches...I want to write you, I want to write a long walk on a starry night, I want to write an exhale or an inhale...or suffocation.
I want to write as clear as my voice could be heard...that is, if I had anything to say.”
― Augusten Burroughs

“We tried to everything right, now we were forced to do everything wrong and it was working.”
― Augusten Burroughs

“Never, ever try to impress somebody.
Be exactly the person you would be if you were alone or with somebody it was safe to fart around.
Be that person. Be the person you are right now, alone, reading this book.
And then meet people.
Then hold out until you meet somebody who is utterly impressed.
Because then? You will not have impressed them. They will have been impressed by you.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“Speaking the words aloud so they would exist in the world and begin to become real.”
― Augusten Burroughs, A Wolf at the Table

“It's a wonder I'm even alive. Sometimes I think that. I think that I can't believe I haven't killed myself. But there's something in me that just keeps going on. I think it has something to do with tomorrow, that there always is one, and that everything can change when it comes.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors