Amy's Reviews > 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, Running with Scissors

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

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

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

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

“look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“Bookman isn't a stable man. He has a lot of problems that run very, very deep."
But he was really good at giving head.”
― Augusten Burroughs, 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, 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, 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, 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.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“Instead of becoming depressed that I was in the locked ward of a mental hospital, I pretended I was playing a role in a movie, possibly on my way to an Emmy.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“She was a rare psychotic-confessional-poet strain of salmonella.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“It was so extraordinarily out of the ordinary.”
― Augusten Burroughs, 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, 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, Running With Scissors

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

“It was not uncommon to walk in the door of their home and find my mother sitting on the sofa reading over a manuscript with shampoo horns sculpted into her hair. Anne Sexton's voice would be blasting from the speakers. A woman who writes feels too much...”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“He looked and sounded exactly like a real psychiatrist. Until he opened his mouth.
"Let's ask God," he said.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“I had the same worry that we wouldn't later be able to undo whatever it was we were doing to ourselves.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“If my mother was odd enough to crave a bubble bath at three in the morning, Dorothy was inventive enough to suggest adding broken glass to the tub. If my mother insisted on listening to West Side Story repeatedly, it was Dorothy who said, 'Let's listen to it on forty-five!' And when my mother announced that she wanted a fur wrap like Auntie Mame, Dorothy bought her an unstable Norwegian elkhound from a puppy mill.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“Not crazy in a 'let's paint the kitchen bright red!' sort of way. But crazy in a 'gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God' sort of way. Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the wax.p28”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“Dorothy viewed my mother's propensity toward madness not as something to be afraid of, but rather as something to look forward to, like a movie or a newly released color of nail polish.

'Your mother is just expressing herself,' Dorothy would tell me when my mother stopped sleeping, started smoking the filters of her cigarettes and began writing backward with a glitter pen.

No, she's not,' I would say. 'She's going insane again.'

Don't be so mundane,' she would yawn, passing my mother a shoebox filled with cat vertebrae. 'She is a brilliant artist. If you want Hamburger Helper, go find some other mother.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“I could not imagine the kind of person that would, upon seeing a crazy talcum-powder-covered Southern lady think to herself, Hmmmm, she might make a great new friend. The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“It wasn't like he was holding me so much as trying to hold onto something.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“Oh, I had a great time. My thirty-three-year-old boyfriend said he wished they could package my cum like ice cream so he could eat it all day.”
― Augusten Burroughs, 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 always is one, and that everything can change when it comes.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“And then just as suddenly, I felt absolutely nothing. It was like a door quickly opened, showing me what horrible feelings I had inside, and then slammed shut again so I wouldn't have to actually face them. In many ways I felt I was living the life of a doctor in the ER. I was learning to block out all emotions in order to deal with the situation.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“I would borrow the microphone and stuff it down the front of my pants, examining myself from every angle in the mirror”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“And as soon as I thought this, I tried to think of something else quickly. Because we were so close that I felt sometimes like she could read my mind.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“I wanted to shove her typewriter on the floor. I hated it and I hated her. I wanted to be a Cosby.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“for me it provided a kaleidoscopic view of everything that was wrong with me. I could already feel it opening all the windows in my hear, giving me a panoramic view of my flaws”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“One minute we were sitting at the lowly kitchen table moaning about the sorry state of our lives and the next we were liberating the architecture with heavy projectiles. This was pure, freedom. Better than sniffing glue.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“Freedom was what we had. Nobody told us when to go to bed. Nobody told us to do our homework. Nobody told us we couldn’t drink two six-packs of Budweiser and then throw up in the Maytag.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it. —Jules Renard, 1890”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors