Augusten Burroughs Quotes

I warn you all, hatred is finding fertile soil within me. And in your compassion, in your every good intention, you nurture it.

I do try to be resentful, I really do, but I just can't bring myself to do it.

I don't mean to sound bitter, cold, or cruel, but I am, so that's how it comes out.

Jealousy is the jaundice of the soul.

I have moments of darkness, of anger, and moments of rage. They do creep up at the most inopportune times. Not to recognize that in my music would give people a sense of sainthood that I don't necessarily have or even want to have.

It would be impossible to estimate how much time and energy we invest in trying to fix, change and deny our emotions - especially the ones that shake us at our very core, like hurt, jealousy, loneliness, shame, rage and grief.

Jealousy is not at all low, but it catches us humbled and bowed down, at first sight.

Envy and jealousy are incurable diseases.

Envy, like flame, blackens that which is above it, and which it cannot reach.

Envy bestrides praise.

I am...sad and angry. Why is my spirit so sad and angry? I look back at my life and all I can remember is rage and rage and rage.

Of all hostile feelings, envy is perhaps the hardest to be subdued, because hardly any one owns it even to himself, but looks out for one pretext after another to justify his hostility.

It was not the beautiful or pleasant feelings that gave me new insight, but the ones against which I fought most strongly: feelings that made me experience myself as shabby, petty, mean, helpless, humiliated, demanding, resentful or confused, and above all, sad and lonely. It was precisely through these experiences, which I had shunned for so long, that I became certain that I now understood something about my life, stemming from the core of my being, something that I could not have learned from any book.

I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.

Envy is a gun with a faulty breech-lock which flares back and burns the gunner.

What is envy? It is nothing but passive jealousy. Maybe jealousy is too strong a phenomenon; envy is a little passive. The difference may be of degrees, but it is not of quality, it is only of quantity. Envy can become jealousy at any moment; envy is just jealousy in progress. Mind has to drop all envies and jealousies.

Our envy of others devours us most of all.

Envy may justly be called "the gall of bitterness and bond of iniquity;" it is the most acid fruit that grows on the stock of sin, a fluid so subtle that nothing but the fire of divine love can purge it from the soul.

Envy and jealousy stem from the fundamental inability to rejoice at someone else's happiness or success

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

Resentment slowly poisoned my blood and I laughed at myself and my absurd hopes.

Few things are more bitter than to feel bitter.

Hope, how she had grown to hate the word. It was an insideious seed planted inside a person's soul, surviving covertly on little tending, then flowering so spectacularly that none could help but cherish it.

Envy, if surrounded on all sides by the brightness of another's prosperity, like the scorpion confined within a circle of fire, will sting itself to death.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.