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McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.
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Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.
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You still don't know what you do well.
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A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.
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The 1990s felt like the 1990s in a real and good way.
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Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.
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The thing about the end of the world is that not just the West collapses, the whole world does.
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When you're young you always feel that life hasn't yet begun...But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive.
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The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would.
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I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C's and D's. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room.
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Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.
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Language is such a technology.
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North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989.
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Nobody likes being told who or what they are.
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Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.
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'Why are we drinking Zima? It’s beyond irony. It’s not funny or anything. It’s just gross. Why not just serve us jugs of Hitler’s piss instead?''Drinking Zima is something Douglas Coupland would make a character do.''To what end?''It’d be a device that would allow him to locate the characters in time and a specific sort of culture.'
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I think the killers get far too much attention.
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The heart of a man is like deep water.
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Vancouver is the square root of negative one. Technically it shouldn't exist, but it does. I can't imagine living anywhere else.
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Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one's taking.
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Hip flasks are the juice machines of the alcohol world - everyone has one and it never gets used.
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Being alive is just a brief technicality. (p. 167)
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Whatever happened to books? Suddenly everybody's talking about these 100-hour movies called 'Breaking Bad'. People are talking about TV the same way they used to talk about novels back in the 1980s. I like to think I hang out with some pretty smart people, but all they talk about is 'Breaking Bad.'
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There used to be a tradition of the loveable rogue who would steal from the honour boxes in churches and buy a round of drinks with the money he snagged. And everyone would find him tremendously good company. But not any more.