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I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes.

Augusten Burroughs

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Augusten Burroughs
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: October 23
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Childhood
Recycle
Look
Rusty
Looks
Tuna
Many
Recycling
Different
Giant
Really
Giants
Shapes
Continue

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It's weird - sort of not terribly wise - to take a book that was successful and then change its cover.
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I never listen to music when I write.
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I think writers tend to be experience junkies, and I think they also tend to want to be on the outside looking in.
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The truth about not having everything you need, not being fully equipped or qualified or allowed is that these limits are the nebula of creative genius. When you have total freedom i.e: no limits at all. You stop trying to make the best of things
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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.
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I'm grateful for a lot of things. One is not being a drunk wreck. Or losing all four limbs in some ridiculous East Village bus accident that I was so destined for.
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So that's what I'm here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven't felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green.
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Confidence is a reduction of your own interest in whether others are thinking about you and if so, what they're thinking.
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Marriage is overdone. As long as there are people, people are going to find it interesting.
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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.
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Childhood is what ended me up in the hospital and teetering on the edge of deathly alcoholism. It was really good for me to accept it. To accept all the embarrassment and the shame so I don't feel like I used to.
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I felt a bottomless sadness. So completely alone. Like one of my stuffed animals at home that I was too old for now, that sat on the shelf in my closet, mashed against the back wall.
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I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it.
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I read a lot of science books - I love cosmology, quantum theory, particle physics. So my idea of a great read would probably put you directly into a coma.
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Some damage is too severe, some harm endures. And what you have to do is accept it. And by accept it I mean, don’t be the paralyzed person in the bed who is waiting to walk again. Realize, it’s never gonna happen. And find some other way to get around –swing from a vine, get a Mad Max wheelchair. Anything but…wait.
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It terrified me to consider: What if, as a grown-up, I craved another body beside me as still as this one? What then?
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I thought, I can't do advertising any more, so I was downloading all these PDF applications from community colleges. And I thought, I'll become a paramedic. I'll get a two-year associate degree, if I can get in.
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Even when we lose an arm or a leg, there's not less of us but more. Human experience weighs more than human tissue.
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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.
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I was on the cover of a lot of newspapers. I was on the cover of USA Today for every single day for a month. I was on the masthead, so I tend to get recognized a lot, and in weird places. It's always flattering, and it's always odd. It's always at the worst possible time.
Augusten Burroughs