Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“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, 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, 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 , 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, 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, 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, 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, A Wolf at the Table

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

“I discovered the bleeding when he licked my hand and left a swath of blood behind, death's autograph.”
― Augusten Burroughs, 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, A Wolf at the Table

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

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

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

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

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

“These fragments are all that remain of my early childhood. There are no words, just sounds: my mother's breathy humming in my ear, her voice the most familiar thing to me, more known than my own hand. My hand still surprises me at all times; the lines and creases, the way the webbing between my fingers glows red if I hold up my hand to block the sun. My mother's voice is my home and when I am surrounded by her sounds, I sleep.”
― Augusten Burroughs, 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, A Wolf at the Table

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

“Everything important originated with nothingness.”
― Augusten Burroughs, A Wolf at the Table

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

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

“All a rainbow is is light that walks behind a raindrop and its colors fall out.”
― Augusten Burroughs, 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, A Wolf at the Table

“At Gayhead point, I wondered what it would feel like to fall.
If you raised your arms above your head like you were diving and you aimed true for the waves, wouldn’t you experience perfect freedom? That the body would land broken on the rocks below didn’t matter, because you wouldn’t be there for the landing. So you would experience only that single moment of clean, pure freedom and grace.

But then, that would be it. There would be no chance to remember that feeling and strive, for the rest of your life, to feel it again. Or to surpass it. Or to pull somebody aside and tell them what it had felt like.
There would be nothing. It reminded me of when I wanted to find out about the universe and I’d asked my father, “What was there before there was everything?�
He said, “There was nothing.�
“But what is nothing?�
“Nothing is nothing,� he said.

It was so difficult to picture. Because wasn’t nothing something too? Wasn’t the thick silence and blackness of nothing actually a place you could be?
Son, I’m tired. Please just go outside and play.
Is that what death was like?
But no, it wouldn’t be “like� anything.
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.
At Christmas, the floor could be spread with gifts, but I would be concerned only with what I didn’t get. Not pouting because I didn’t get a sweater vest, but wondering, What would have been in the box that isn’t here?
My brother inspired awe in me because he wasn’t there anymore.
I loved my mother most when she was locked behind her door, writing. Because I couldn’t have her. And because I never hugged my father, it was his embrace I sought most of all.
Where there is nothing, absolutely anything is possible. And this thrilled me. It gave me hope.
In a way, if I wasn’t having a happy childhood right now, I could have one later.”
― Augusten Burroughs, A Wolf at the Table