Quotes By Person: Douglas Coupland
“...life is just an endless banquet of loss, and each time a new loss is doled out, you have to move your mental furniture around, throw things out, and by then there's more loss, and the cycle goes on and on.”
-All Families Are Psychotic, Douglas Coupland
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“A day in which nothing bad happens is a miracle, a day in which all the things that could have gone wrong didn't. The dull day is a triumph of the human spirit, and boredom is a luxury unprecedented in the history of our species.”
-All Families Are Psychotic, Douglas Coupland
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“She thought about her life and how lost she'd felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she'd been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?”
-All Families Are Psychotic, Douglas Coupland
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“One of my big problems is time sickness. When I feel lonely, I assume that the mood will never pass--that I'll feel lonely and bad for the rest of my life, which means that I've wrecked both the present and the future. And if I look back on my past, I wreck that too, by concentrating on all the things I did wrong. The brutal thing about time sickness is that naming it is no cure. I look at the philodendron on the kitchen windowsill, the only thing in my condo that ever changes. I found it at a bus stop twelve years ago and I've kept it going ever since. I like it because up close its leaves are pretty, and also because it makes me think of time in a way that doesn't totally depress me. ”
-Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland
Recommended by Shay.
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“Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective.”
-Generation X, Douglas Coupland
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“He embodies to me all of the people of my own generation who used all that was good in themselves just to make money; who use their votes for short-term gain. Who ended up blissful in the bottom-feeding jobs—marketing, land flipping, ambulance chasing, and money brokering. Such smugness. They saw themselves as eagles building mighty nests of oak branches and bulrushes, when instead they were really more like the eagles here in California, the ones who built their nests from tufts of abandoned auto parts looking like sprouts picked off a sandwich—rusted colonic mufflers and herniated fan belts—gnarls of freeway flotsam from the bleached grass meridians of the Santa Monica cheap, vulgar, toxic items that will either decompose in minutes or remain essentially unchanged until our galaxy goes supernova.”
-Generation X, Douglas Coupland
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“I am reminded that no matter how hard you try, you can never be more than twelve years old with your parents. Parents earnestly try not to inflame, but their comments contain no scale and a strange focus. Discussing your private life with parents is like misguidedly looking at a zit in a car's rearview mirror and being convinced, in the absence of contrast or context, that you have developed combined heat rash and skin cancer.”
-Generation X, Douglas Coupland
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“Sometimes I think the people to feel saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder—people who closed the doors that lead us into the secret world—or who had the doors closed for them by time and neglect and decisions made in times of weakness.”
-Generation X, Douglas Coupland
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“When you see such photos, you can't help but wonder at just how sweet and sad and innocent all moments of life are rendered by the tripping of a camera's shutter, for at that point the future is still unknown and has yet to hurt us, and also for that brief moment, our poses are accepted as honest.”
-Generation X, Douglas Coupland
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“Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs. Ask: When did we become human beings and stop being whatever it was we were before this? Ask: What was the specific change that made us human? Ask: Why do people not particularly care about their ancestors more than three generations back? Ask: Why are we unable to think of any real future beyond, say, a hundred years from now? Ask: How can we begin to think of the future as something enormous before us that also includes us? Ask: Having become human, what is it that we are now doing or creating that will transform us into whatever it is that we are slated to next become?”
-Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
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“At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?”
-Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
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“If you look at life as a whole, we have to admit life's good where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there's nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a Bohemia or a creative under-world to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag - or a life of crime, or even religion. And now there's only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people it's the System or what... death? There's nothing. There's no way out now.”
-Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
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“Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but tucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.”
-Girlfriend In A Coma, Douglas Coupland
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“One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild—into its ancestral sea—its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end.”
-Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
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“What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation.”
-Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
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“And then...and then I felt truly old for the first time—old in the sense that I was beyond the point of ever doing something radical or bold to change the course of my life...I was sick of wanting money. I was sick of being without a goal.”
-Hey Nostradamus!, Douglas Coupland
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“For what it's worth, I think God is how you deal with everything that's out of your own control. It's as good a definition as any.”
-Hey Nostradamus!, Douglas Coupland
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“.. how often is it we are rescued by a stranger, if ever at all? And how is it that our lives can become drained of the possibility of forgiveness and kindness - so drained that even one small act of mercy becomes a potent lifelong memory? How do our lives reach these points?”
-Life After God, Douglas Coupland
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“I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older, as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.”
-Life After God, Douglas Coupland
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“I cry because the future has once again found its sparkle and has grown a million times larger. And I cry because I am ashamed of how badly I have treated the people I love—of how badly I behaved during my own personal Dark Ages—back before I had a future and someone who cared for me from above. It is like today the sky opened up and only now am I allowed to enter.”
-Shampoo Planet, Douglas Coupland
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