Quote

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.

Augusten Burroughs

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Augusten Burroughs
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: October 23
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Fact
Confess
Detailing
Facts
Modeling
Mortifying
School
Graduates
Spirals
Even
Shame
Rehab
Something
Personal
Therapists
Never
Happened
Admitted
Life
Anyone
Graduate
Friends
Fourteen

More quotes by Augusten Burroughs

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My thoughts seem thick, ketchup stuck in a bottle. Like trying to feel someone's face while wearing goosedown mittens.
Augusten Burroughs
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Writing has enriched my life in ways I never imaged.
Augusten Burroughs
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To me, these people were as exotic as animals in a zoo. I'd never seen anything like them. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be one of them or simply live among them taking notes and photographs.
Augusten Burroughs
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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
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The past doesn't haunt us, we haunt the past.
Augusten Burroughs
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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.
Augusten Burroughs
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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
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The Schnauzer listens to jazz. I listen to jazz because he likes it, and I have even gone to jazz concerts with him, but truthfully I would rather listen to retarded children pounding on pan lids with wooden spoons.
Augusten Burroughs
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Never work with children, puppies or bulimics.
Augusten Burroughs
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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
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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.
Augusten Burroughs
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My only ritual is to just sit down and write, write every day.
Augusten Burroughs
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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.
Augusten Burroughs
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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.
Augusten Burroughs
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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
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As a young child I had Santa and Jesus all mixed up. I could identify Coke or Pepsi with just one sip, but I could not tell you for sure why they strapped Santa to a cross. Had he missed a house? Had a good little girl somewhere in the world not received the doll he'd promised her, making the father angry?
Augusten Burroughs
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Optimism sprouts from the knowledge that you are in control of your own life, not your past and not those around you. Part of being in control is taking responsibility for how you feel. This means not just admitting to uncomfortable feelings but then examining your circumstances to see what can be done to change these feelings at the source.
Augusten Burroughs
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Not crazy in a 'let's paint the kitchen bright red!' sort of way. But crazy in a 'gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God' sort of way. Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the wax.p28
Augusten Burroughs
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I was like a packet of powdered Sea Monkeys and they were like water.
Augusten Burroughs
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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