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"Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be SMcQ23667bot@hotmail.com."
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"In no man's land, alien is the queen."

"We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams."

"Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there."

"Money is the alienated essence of man's labor and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it."

"I could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn't mind at all. It's me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human."

"Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant's Whore."

"If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal."

"I'm not a bad person. I haven't killed anyone. I (rarely) lie. I don't kick little puppies. So why do people look at me as if the world would be a better place without me?"

"Humanity's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there."

"The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society."
Explore more quotes by Doug Coupland

"You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about by yourself."

"Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler."

"You can't get mad at weather because weather's not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life."

"I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and rename three o'clock 'Pepsi.'"
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