Augusten Burroughs Quotes

The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss—you have gone and lost something else. But the body moves toward health. The mind, too, in steps. One step at a time. Ask a mother who has just lost a child, How many children do you have? "Four," she will say, "—three," and years later, "Three," she will say, "—four.

In life, you have to learn how to heal. You never get over stuff, but you have to learn how to heal.

Things get better--hurt less--over time. If you let them.

Such wounds to the heart will probably never heal. But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.

I know," she said, guessing my thoughts. "I know exactly how you feel." "Does it get easier?" I asked. Unlike Sydney, Olena had an answer. "Yes. But you'll never be the same.

To heal our wounds, we need courage to face them.

(Grief) is something you never really get over, but you put it in a place inside you and deal with it in the way you have to.

Grief was like a terrible burden, but at least you could lay it down by the side of the road and walk away from it. Antonia had come only a few paces, but already she could turn and look back and not weep. It wasn't anything to do with forgetting. It was just accepting. Nothing was ever so bad once you had accepted it.

It's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief . . . lessens. It may not go away completely, but after a while it's not so overwhelming.

Forgive yourself. Forgive others. Don't wait.

That which is denied cannot be healed.

I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep.... Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended

Broken hearts healed. Maybe the cracks were always there, like thin scars, but they healed. People lived and worked, laughed and ate, walked and talked with those cracks For many, even the scars healed and they loved again.

It can take years of tears to melt the hardness that develops in this world, covering our tender, gentler inner selves. Tears for every devastating loss, tears for every humiliating failure, tears for every repeated mistake. Those who honor those tears, and even honor them, are not failures at love but rather its true initiates. First the pain and then the power. First the heart breaks and then it soars.

When you're threatened, or something hard hits you, acknowledge it, embrace it. Don't pretend that you didn't get hurt - hurt, cry, think about it. And then you let it go and try something else.

I don't believe you ever get closure on anything. Things leave a permanent mark on you.

I tell myself time heals. It really does.

It has been said that time heals all wounds. I don't agree. The wounds remain. Time - the mind, protecting its sanity - covers them with some scar tissue and the pain lessens, but it is never gone.

Of course! It takes a lot of strength to mend a broken heart. Channelising energies into your work helps, but also to be able to accept situations for what they are instead of questioning them helps immensely.

They always say, 'Time heals.' But it really doesn't. You just get used to it. I live life with the mentality of 'OK, I lost the only thing that has ever been important to me.' So going forward, anything bad that happens can't be nearly as bad as what happened before.

What happened in my past happened. What's the term - don't cry over spilled milk? That's the thing people don't understand. I'm all right. I configured myself into coming out on the other end OK. I can disassociate myself.

Forgiveness is a scalpel that removes emotional scars.

I think that maybe forgiveness is like change - it comes in small steps. (256)

And yet, I found I could survive. I was alert, I felt the pain - the aching loss that radiated out from my chest, sending wracking waves of hurt through my limbs and head - but it was manageable. I could live through it. I didn't feel like the pain had weakened over time, rather that I'd grown strong enough to bear it.