Augusten Burroughs Quotes

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".

For me, growing up, I felt like there was something fatally and tragically flawed in my nature and that it was my duty to try to avoid falling for that vice.

It used to be that I was always paranoid or a loser or something so there's usually something that you seem to associate yourself with at one time or another.

I hate you." I love you." You're a freak, you know that? Everyone says so. They always have." I'm trying not to be.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

I was never my favourite subject.

It's tough being me.

If I'm honest I don't think the world would miss me if I never acted again.

I don't understand my own sporadic collapses into passivity. Perhaps I never will.

For a long time, I would go out of my way to have a personal appearance on the verge of an insane person, because it was closer to how I felt, but I looked so dumb. So, I just stopped. It was like, 'I'm just going to look like a banker.'

I really wasn't heavy in high school. But no one feels right in their own skin, particularly in high school.

I used to think of myself in terms of who I'd be if I didn't have this pesky old disability.

I knew from a very young age that there was something very wrong with me.

You go from nobody looking at you to people taking second looks. I remember really loving it - and then feeling so guilty for loving it. Like, 'That's gross, Kristen.' Also, telling myself it could go away at any moment, and I'd be so sad.

But I've always been fascinated with that prettiest-girl-in-the-class person that I never was, getting inside her head and showing that she's just as tormented and messed up as everybody else.

Part of me suspects that I'm a loser, and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty.

I'll be me, but I don't like it.

Who you are vs. who you wish you were: Who wins?

Of all afflictions, the worst is self-contempt.

I'm searching, as we all are, for ways to feel good about myself. Certainly, looking in the mirror doesn't do it!

I see pictures of myself and I always knew that what I was feeling didn't look like that guy in the pictures.

I love playing ego and insecurity combined.

I have had a dream indicating rather clearly that I am on the way to being hetero, though I don't accept it with much enthusiasm either awake or in the dreams.

I can't look at the mirror beyond two minutes. I don't know what to look at. What is the point of looking at yourself? You can't change your face.