Augusten Burroughs

My question was:How did I go from merely seeing the dirty French Santa in a bar to being in his hotel room the next morning? And this presented me with an actual equation. How did one plus one equal old French Santa?

This is what you should know about losing someone you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.

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.

Saying just the right thing after a considerable, awkward pause is far less effective than saying the wrong thing with perfect timing. I'm telling you.

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.

When you say, "I need more confidence," what you're really saying is, "I need those people over there to approve of me."That is the desire to control other people and what they think. The first person who figures out how to do this owns the world.

Part of me felt deep compassion. And another part felt like, You fucker.

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__ promised her, making the father angry?_ (p.3)

I was desperate to discover what nothing felt like. It was the absence of something that attracted me. It was the start. Everything important originated with nothingness.

I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.

If you believe suicide will bring you peace, or at the very least just an end to everything you hate- you are displaying self-caring behavior. You are still able to actively seek solutions to your problems. You are willing to go to great lengths to provide what you believe will be soothing to yourself.This strikes me as optimistic.

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.

I love you," she said, and I knew she meant it because she spoke the words from the heart at the center of her chest. This, at least, had not been left behind at the hospital.

...Trying is not the same as being. Trying flies in a circle around the moment and *being* is inside of it.

And we were married and all the windows were open but the smell of flowers was so thick and sickly sweet. I felt like I might choke to death.

I nodded again, but I knew I would not grow up to drive a bulldozer. It would be awful to be dirty all day like these men. I didn't say it, but at best I would keep one in the backyard, like a goat.

Just as I had long suspected, a person didn't really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people.

Doctor, if being a bitch is healthy, then I am the healthiest damn woman on the face of the earth