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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.

Augusten Burroughs

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Augusten Burroughs
Age: 58
Born: 1965
Born: October 23
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Inside
Cannot
Past
Live
Mind
Prisoner

More quotes by Augusten Burroughs

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Throwing things horrified me. I suffered extreme, paralyzing anxiety when it came to anything remotely athletic. I wouldn't even run to catch the school bus because I knew I'd trip and then get teased for a year.
Augusten Burroughs
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Confidence is a reduction of your own interest in whether others are thinking about you and if so, what they're thinking.
Augusten Burroughs
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I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes.
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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After was better. Before was only there so After could happen.
Augusten Burroughs
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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.
Augusten Burroughs
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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
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This is what you should know about losing someone you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.
Augusten Burroughs
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Some damage is too severe, some harm endures. And what you have to do is accept it. And by accept it I mean, don’t be the paralyzed person in the bed who is waiting to walk again. Realize, it’s never gonna happen. And find some other way to get around –swing from a vine, get a Mad Max wheelchair. Anything but…wait.
Augusten Burroughs
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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.
Augusten Burroughs
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but I am not here ironically I am here sincerely.
Augusten Burroughs
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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.
Augusten Burroughs
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Most of us have love in our lives. Most of us love other people are are ourselves loved by others. But make no mistake: you are alone in the world. You were born alone, even if you were born conjoined. And you die alone, unable to bring a single person with you.
Augusten Burroughs
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The more obsessed one is with getting thin, the more certain it becomes that one will never get there.
Augusten Burroughs
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God, I felt certain, did not mind that I didn’t press my hands together to pray. I was casual, but I was sincere. I knew that God existed as the Correct Answer inside my chest.
Augusten Burroughs
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I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.
Augusten Burroughs
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Bad news should be followed with soup. Then a nap.
Augusten Burroughs
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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
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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
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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.
Augusten Burroughs