Quotes from A Wolf at the Table

“I came to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren’t alone. Maybe God was simply that part of yourself that was always there and always strong, even when you were not.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“God, I felt certain, did not mind that I didn’t press my hands together to pray. I was casual, but I was sincere. I knew that God existed as the Correct Answer inside my chest.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“Nothing made sense to me anymore. I knew I was young, I knew I was small. But I was worried that I might already be ruined.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“I knew I had an ugly life. I knew I was lonely and I was scared. I thought something might be wrong with my father, wrong in the worst possible way. I believed he might contain a pathology of the mind--an emptiness--a knocking hollow where his soul should have been. But I also knew that one day, I would grow up. One day, I would be twenty, or thirty, or forty, even fifty and sixty and seventy and eighty and maybe even one hundred years old. And all those years were mine, they belonged to nobody but me. So even if I was unhappy now, it could all change tomorrow. Maybe I didn't even need to jump off the cliff to experience that kind of freedom. Maybe the fact that I knew such a freedom existed in the world meant that I could someday find it.
Maybe, I thought, I don't need a father to be happy. Maybe, what you get from a father you can get somewhere else, from somebody else, later. Or maybe you can just work around what's missing, build the house of your life over the hole that is there and always will be.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“I love you," she said, and I knew she meant it because she spoke the words from the heart at the center of her chest. This, at least, had not been left behind at the hospital.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“While I liked hamsters, too, the Habitrail cage was expensive. Even I could see that the interconnecting boxes, tubes, and spheres could easily bankrupt a family and lead to addiction later in life. Because, how would you know when to stop? How could you stop? An entire city could be built with a Habitrail.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“It was like living in a new house. I saw the undersides of tables, walked through the tangle of chair legs. It would be good to be a dog, I thought. You would feel safe surrounded by all of these leggy objects that never tried to run away.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“I saw a monkey walking on a leash and thought it was an ugly foreign child.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“It terrified me to consider: What if, as a grown-up, I craved another body beside me as still as this one? What then?”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“I walked up to the house, rubbing my shoulder where it still hurt from the rifle's recoil. But soon, it wouldn't hurt because I would get used to it. It was amazing to me, what a person could get used to.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“I paused finally and watched the trees for slashes of light, but saw none. As my heart settled and my ears became less occupied I listened and heard nothing but the thready pulse of the night. And I sensed that the hunt was over. I'd been prey and now I was not. Prey knows this. Prey knows when it has escaped.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“Augusten very distant tonight. Probably because of my games.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“Riding back from the grocery store, I realized my father was two men—one he presented to the outside world, and one, far darker, that was always there, behind the face everybody else saw. In my bedroom late that”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“How could something have no end, and if it had no end exactly where did it leave us?”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“We were alone together, we were an us.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“My worth depended on where exactly the decimal was placed among the zeroes.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“I slipped on a turtleneck, laughing when my head became stuck in the turtle part. If they weren't called turtlenecks, I wouldn't have worn them.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“I nodded again, but I knew I would not grow up to drive a bulldozer. It would be awful to be dirty all day like these men. I didn't say it, but at best I would keep one in the backyard, like a goat.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“I was desperate to show him what I could do on my own. But my father, because he hadn't been there, simply didn't believe what I was actually capable of accomplishing.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“Speaking the words aloud so they would exist in the world and begin to become real.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“People believe in god because they can't think to be alone.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“If i wasn't an accident mustn't I be a crushing disappointment?”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“Where there is nothing, absolutely anything is possible.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“How can you really miss something when you never experienced it?”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“I could see jabs from his flashlight cutting into the woods on either side of me. He was back there, somewhere. The light beam was like a knife and I didn't want it on my back.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“Didn’t every new thing you did become a part of you, one of your bricks?”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“I made very good money and spent all of it every week. I lived paycheck to paycheck...”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from A Wolf at the Table

“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, quote from A Wolf at the Table

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Popular quotes

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“It is necessary to make this point in answer to the `iatrogenic' theory that the unveiling of repressed memories in MPD sufferers, paranoids and schizophrenics can be created in analysis; a fabrication of the doctor—patient relationship. According to Dr Ross, this theory, a sort of psychiatric ping-pong 'has never been stated in print in a complete and clearly argued way'.
My case endorses Dr Ross's assertions. My memories were coming back to me in fragments and flashbacks long before I began therapy. Indications of that abuse, ritual or otherwise, can be found in my medical records and in notebooks and poems dating back before Adele Armstrong and Jo Lewin entered my life.
There have been a number of cases in recent years where the police have charged groups of people with subjecting children to so-called satanic or ritual abuse in paedophile rings. Few cases result in a conviction. But that is not proof that the abuse didn't take place, and the police must have been very certain of the evidence to have brought the cases to court in the first place. The abuse happens. I know it happens. Girls in psychiatric units don't always talk to the shrinks, but they need to talk and they talk to each other.
As a child I had been taken to see Dr Bradshaw on countless occasions; it was in his surgery that Billy had first discovered Lego. As I was growing up, I also saw Dr Robinson, the marathon runner. Now that I was living back at home, he was again my GP. When Mother bravely told him I was undergoing treatment for MPD/DID as a result of childhood sexual abuse, he buried his head in hands and wept.
(Alice refers to her constant infections as a child, which were never recognised as caused by sexual abuse)”
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“Acaso se deba a que vivo mucho conmigo mismo y los más pequeños detalles en una vida tan monótona adquieren una importancia demasiado grande. Me escucho en exceso cuando vivo, cuando pienso; oigo el latido de mis arterias y las pulsaciones de mi corazón y a fuerza de atención desprendo las ideas más inaprensibles del turbio vapor en que flotan y les doy cuerpo. Si actuase más, no repararía en esas pequeñeces ni tendría tiempo de mirar mi alma al microscopio, como hago todo el día.”
― Théophile Gautier, quote from Mademoiselle de Maupin

“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quote from Der kleine Prinz

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