Quotes from Running with Scissors

“I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn’t deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention. For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks-accidentally-and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you’re alive.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“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 is always one, and that everything can change when it comes.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“You deserve to need me, not to have me.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“My mother began to go crazy. Not in a 'Let's paint the kitchen red!' sort of way. But crazy in a 'gas oven, toothpaste sandwhich, I am God' sort of way.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“I told myself, 'All I want is a normal life'. But was that true? I wasn't so sure. Because there was a part of me that enjoyed hating school, and the drama of not going, the potential consequences whatever they were. I was intrigued by the unknown. I was even slightly thrilled that my mother was such a mess. Had I become addicted to crisis? I traced my finger along the windowsill. 'Want something normal, want something normal, want something normal', I told myself.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“Doctor, if being a bitch is healthy, then I am the healthiest damn woman on the face of the earth”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin. A person would have to be an expert tightrope walker in order not to fall.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“I will please shut the hell up the day you please drop the hell dead”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“I just look at her and she creeps me out. She looks like she would eat a baby. Not that she's fat. She just looks hungry in some dangerous way that can't be explained. She's always so nice and friendly. Exactly the disposition of a baby killer.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“We were young. We were bored. And the old electroshock therapy machine was just under the stairs in a box next to the Hoover.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“Turn off the light," she says as she walks away, creating a small woosh that smells sweet and chemical. It makes me sad because it's the smell she makes when she's leaving.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“But she did love him. I believe it. I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“I missed him so much that I had physical sensations of loss, all over my body. Like one minute I was missing an arm, the next my spleen. It was making me feel sick, like throwing up.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“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.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“The problem with not having anybody to tell you what to do, I understood, is that there was nobody to tell you what not to do.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“I was learning that if I lived slightly in the future-what will happen next-I didn't have to feel so much about what was going on in the present.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“Now I can add prostitute to my list of life's accomplishments.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“I couldn't help but think, This car is taking me to a mental hospital and my mother is treating it like open-mic night at a Greenwich Village café.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“What nobody understood then is this: The only way that you achieve what you want and fulfill your dreams and become great is by demanding that sort of attention. You have to make it happen.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“You know what we need? We need to get jobs, get the fuck out of that crazy house,' Natalie said, dipping a McNugget into her sauce.

Yeah, right. Jobs doing what? Our only skills are oral sex and restraining agitated psychotics.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“I did not consider him to be any kind of a genius. I considered him deeply lacking in the area that mattered most in life. Star quality.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“He was raised without a proper diagnosis.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“Maybe it was a Patty Hearst thing. Stockholm syndrome or whatever it's called when you're being held against your will but then you become sucked in and fall in love. Or if not exactly love, you fall into something you can't see out of. 'I can't shoot a machine gun' becomes 'Hey, this hardly has any kick-back!”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“It turned out I had always been a smoker. I just hadn't had any cigarettes.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

“My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron. ”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors

About the author

Popular quotes

“When woman work outside the home and share breadwinning duties, couples are more likely to stay together. In fact, the risk of divorce reduces by about half when a wife earns half the income and a husband does half the housework.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

“Her voice was flat, in a way Myrna recognized from years of listening to people trying to rein in their emotions. To squash them down, flatten, them, and with them their words and their voices. Desperately trying to make the horrific sound mundane.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“I had an unusually large-sized head, though this was not uncommon for a baby in the Midwest. The craniums in our part of the country were designed to leave a little extra room for the brain to grow in case one day we found ourselves exposed to something we didn't understand, like a foreign language, or a salad.”
― Michael Moore, quote from Here Comes Trouble

“I tried to leave you alone, Fitz. To find what peace you could, even if it excluded me from your life.” Ten years ago, I could not have understood the pain in his voice. I would only have seen him as interfering and calculating. Only now, with a son of my own intent on ignoring every bit of advice I’d ever given him, could I recognize what it had cost him to let me go my own way and make my own choices. He”
― Robin Hobb, quote from The Complete Tawny Man Trilogy: Fool's Errand, The Golden Fool, Fool's Fate

“As Carthage went up in flames in 146 BCE, one eyewitness spotted him shedding a tear and heard him quoting from memory an apposite line on the fall of Troy from Homer’s Iliad. He was reflecting that one day the same fate might afflict Rome. Crocodile tears or not, they made their point.”
― quote from SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.