It may seem to you that your life is over now. Your future without the person you love is no future at all. Death is a head-on collision with your plans. But everything in life--the gold fillings of your teeth, the cotton of your sheets, the air you breathe, all the food you will ever eat--everything there is born from a collision. Inside every single thing that lives is a debt to a distant star that died. Nothing new is ever created without one thing colliding into another. And something new is created when the person you love dies. Because they are not the only ones who die: you die, too. The person you were when you were with them is gone just as surely as they are. This is what you should know about losing somebody you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.

— Augusten Burroughs

It's a wonder I'm even alive. Sometimes I think that. I think that I can't believe I haven't killed myself. But there's something in me that just keeps going on. I think it has something to do with tomorrow, that there always is one, and that everything can change when it comes.

— Augusten Burroughs

It's not such a huge deal when this happens at a 7-Eleven. It's pretty huge, though, when you spend the entire job interview trying not to come across like a box of hair, and you come across like a box of hair.

— Augusten Burroughs

I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of people and then me, on the outside. Because how do you meet a new person? I was very stunned by this for many years. And then I realized, you just say, "Hi." They may ignore you. Or you may marry them. And that possibility is worth that one word.

— Augusten Burroughs

I want to feel calm and at ease. Like someone who lives on Half Moon Bay, California, and makes hummus from scratch. Instead, I feel like I'm a contestant on some awful supermarket game show where I've got sixty seconds to hurl my shopping cart down the aisles, piling it with as much as possible before the buzzer goes off.

— Augusten Burroughs

I want to write something that means something to someone...the reminds them of what a second, a moment, really is...or that assures them that we are just as lost as they are. I want to write an emotion they are too fragile to let loose, so that my words can do the expression for them, the feeling for them. Furthermore, I want to write beyond the basics and the clichés... I want to write you, I want to write a long walk on a starry night, I want to write an exhalation or an inhale...or suffocation. I want to write as clear as my voice could be heard...that is, if I had anything to say.

— Augusten Burroughs

I was desperate to discover what nothing felt like. It was the absence of something that attracted me. It was the start. Everything important originated with nothingness.

— Augusten Burroughs

Just as I had long suspected, a person didn't really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people.

— Augusten Burroughs

Long marriages have ended in ruin over tiny and insignificant grievances that were never properly aired and instead grew into a brittle barnacle of hatred.

— Augusten Burroughs

My goal was to get through the day as fast as possible. I worked fast because I wanted to be done. I wanted to be done because I wanted to go home to my nest and drink.

— Augusten Burroughs