Augusten Burroughs Quotes

The delicate and infirm go for sympathy, not to the well and buoyant, but to those who have suffered like themselves.

A lot of people can relate to me.

Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike.

When he tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is acquainted with grief, we listen, for that also is an acquaintance of our own.

What a blind person needs is not a teacher but another self.

I traffic in empathy. I try to be vulnerable with people so they can be vulnerable back. I've always been searching for empathy in other people. It's when I feel most not alone.

It is easier to speak to those who have had similar experiences than to those who are as yet ignorant.

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

It's difficult to have any animosity towards someone if you recognize that on so many levels they're exactly the same as you.

Nobody is so weird others can't identify with them.

I try to communicate in a way that allows people in on what's going on. What's better than references to popular culture?

For me, I feel like I relate to a lot of people.

People could empathize with other people who had gone through the same experience as they had.

The audience likes a speaker with the same weakness and the same virtues that they themselves have.

There's not many people that I can't relate to and can't share experiences with.

It's cool to be able to relate to people who aren't necessarily from the same way of life as me or don't even maybe know what I'm talking about in some of my songs. It's just cool that music has that ability to do that.

You can't have empathy for somebody that's gone through something you haven't - because, definitionally, you can't. But you can feel for them and have sympathy for them. And that's what this country needs to practice more. It's about realizing that you do come from a different place.

Despair is despair, sorrow is sorrow, death is death. It's not about who is experiencing it; it's about building a bridge of empathy across these experiences.

Your experiences, everything you've gone through, good or bad, it's not for you - it's for helping somebody else. It's to relate to somebody else in need.

When my friends lack an eye, I look at them in profile.

I want people to see some of their own humanity no matter who they are.

I show them the funny part, the silly part, the laughing part, the crazy part and then the really deep, deep part where I'm talking from my heart to these people. Because I've been through everything they've been through.

People love to be listened to and represented, and they love it when they feel like you have some of the same problems that they do. Everybody deals with things like romantic difficulties in relationships and death and cancer and abuse.

I guess initially I was amazed that somebody would see something within my work that they could really relate to, but the more it's happened, the more people have come forward, I've really realized that we're all kind of going through the same thing at the same time.

I've found that the common humanity of people is the most relatable thing, and even if your stories are very specific about a different place, if you have a relatable core of humanity, people will go along with it.