K > K's Quotes

“If you hate your life, you haven't' seen enough of it. If you hate your life, it's because your life is too small and doesn't' fit you.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't

“Most forms of rage, after all, are only sloppy cloaks for grief.”
― Steve Almond, Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America

“For Children: You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn't quite that simple. The fried egg isn't properly a fried egg until it's been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn't do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It's all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“This was to be their place- outside of communion- forever. Maybe we call this the opposite of God.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“This is how you survive the unsurvivable, this is how you lose that which you cannot bear to lose, this is how you reinvent yourself, overcome your abusers, fulfill your ambitions and meet the love of your life: by following what is true, no matter where it leads you.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“You know how sometimes you lie in bed at night and think, “What if the law of gravity just wears out and lets go and I drift into space?” Does that ever make you anxious?”
― Elaine May

“Granny panties. White as a flag, but with no surrender.”
― Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home

“People will eat more salad if there's a chance the next bite will contain a toasted nut.”
― Jennifer Reese, Make the Bread, Buy the Butter: What You Should and Shouldn't Cook from Scratch - Over 120 Recipes for the Best Homemade Foods

“How many worlds make up a life!”
― Carol Drinkwater, The Olive Farm: A Memoir of Life, Love, and Olive Oil in the South of France

“You don't really keep vigil; it keeps you-suspended in awkward silence and dead air-desperate for anything at all to stir some hope out of these murky waters and make things vital again.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“We constantly lived in the paradox of precariousness. The money was never there when you needed it, and it was always on time.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them.”
― John Boyne

“When a person has lived generously and fought fiercely, she deserves more than sadness at the end.”
― Ruth Reichl, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise

“I had done this. I had pulled my life apart. I would never, ever be safe again.”
― Ruth Reichl, Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table

“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”
― C.S. Lewis

“If you obey all of the rules, you miss all of the fun.”
― Katharine Hepburn

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“I needed something--the distraction of another life--to alleviate fear.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park

“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 was 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, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“Even when we lose an arm or a leg, there's not less of us but more. Human experience weighs more than human tissue.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“But feelings, no matter how strong or “ugly,” are not a part of who you are. They are the radio stations your mind listens to if you don’t give it something better to do. Feelings are fluid and dynamic; they change frequently.
Feelings are something you HAVE, not something you ARE. Like physical beauty, a cold sore, or an opinion.

Admitting you feel rage or terrible pain or regret or some old, rotten blame does not mean these feelings are part of who you are as a person. What these feelings mean is, you have to change your thinking to be free of them.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“Where there is willpower there is a Band Aid that's eventually going to fall off.

You only need willpower to get what you don't want or you only want to want. By want to want, I mean, something you wish you wanted but don't really.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“Resentment is anger looking for payback. It's also a high-interest-earning emotion. Each new resentment is added to the ones from before. Long marriages have ended in ruin over tiny and insignificant grievances that were never properly aired and instead grew into a bitter barnacle of hatred.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“Courage isn't having the strength to go on - it is going on when you don't have strength.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“...you can hate a place with all your heart and soul and still be homesick for it.”
― Joseph Mitchell

“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.”
― W.H. Auden

“No matter your spiritual beliefs, if you hold any, the answer is the same: sometimes, why is not knowable. If you open the refrigerator door and a tub of Kozy Shack tapioca pudding tumbles out and splats open onto the floor, you clean it. You don’t stand there and question why it happened, how it was possible. Why doesn’t matter now.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“You would be amazed at what you can give up, lose or break and yet still be a person who gets happy over brownies.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird