Augusten Burroughs Quotes

It is wise for us to forget our troubles, there are always new ones to replace them.

If you woke up, every day, and someone punched you in the face, for the first week, you'd go, 'Why is someone punching me in the face?' But, by the time you got through week two, you'd take it and just go on with the day.

A long-term crisis, after a certain point, no longer seems like a crisis. It seems like the way things are.

Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before.

Losing my father at a tender age was extremely important in being able to accept what happened to me later when I became a quadriplegic.

Today, I don't have any psychological scars, because I am a realist and an optimist. After all, I can't lose my legs twice.

I know I can do it," Todd Downey said, helping himself to another ear of corn from the steaming bowl. "I'm sure that in time her death will be a mystery, even to me.

Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you've lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that's good.

In small letters, someone has written NEVER FORGET on one of the slats. I know it's supposed to be a pledge, but it feels like a curse. Don't we have to forget some of it? Don't we have to forget this feeling? If we don't, how will we live?

He'd lived long enough to know that everyone handled grief in different ways, and little by little, they all seemed to accept their new lives.

Oftentimes things that seem really difficult and traumatic in the short term seem a lot less difficult and traumatic in the long term.

Of course, it's always bad to lose, of course it's always a hardship when you lose to yesterday's miners or yesterday's tractor drivers. But life is life. It'll surely go on.

Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

Americans have mastered the art of living with the unacceptable.

We face up to awful things because we can't go around them, or forget them. The sooner you get it over with, the sooner you say 'Yes, it happened, and there's nothing I can do about it,' the sooner you can get on with your own life. You've got children to bring up. So you've got to get over it. What we have to get over, somehow we do. Even the worst things.

After awhile you could get used to anything.

In the opening to the Mary Tyler Moore Show Mary's in the supermarket, hurrying through the aisles. She pauses at the meat case, picks up a steak and checks the price. Then rolls her eyes, shrugs and tosses it in the cart. That's kind of how I feel. Sure I would have liked things to be different. But, 'roll of eyes' what can you do? 'shrug' I threw the meat in my cart and moved on.

So to really be able to dive into what does it mean to be broken by an experience, and I developed it just through research and talking and understanding the truth of what it means to lose everything.

You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.

The wolves knew when it was time to stop looking for what they'd lost, to focus instead on what was yet to come.

The trick was forgetting about what she had lost ...and learning to go on with what she had left.

But sometimes there’s nothing left to do but move on.

The leaves let go, the seeds let go, and I must let go sometimes, too, and cast my lot with another of nature’s imperfect but tenacious survivors.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are.

We had to play the hand we were dealt, all of us. Fighting the battles we could win.