“It had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know... and the whisper proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.”

Heart Of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

“You know I hate, detest, can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies, - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do.”

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

“He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of individuality which excites - and escapes.”

Victory, Joseph Conrad

“My faith in the firmness of time slips away gradually. I begin to believe that chronological time is an illusion and that some other principle organizes existence. My memories flash like clips of film from unrelated movies. I wonder, suddenly, if I am alive. I know I'm not dead, but am I alive? I look into the memories for reassurance, searching for signs of life.”

Stop-Time, Frank Conroy

“It's impossible to maintain, impossible to sustain. You can't stay like this forever. blissed out. Bugged out. High, but not stoned. I'm in this moment. This second. nowhere else. the work is done. On the highway a few red embers glow on the horizon. I press down on the gas pedal and imagine myself dissolving into the dark, exploding like molecules transmitted through the air, floating forever in silent space -- surrounded by potential, never having to slow down, never having to land.”

Dispatches From The Edge, Anderson Cooper

“In foresight life takes forever while a glance back reduces it to an instant.”

Christopher Copeland Recommended by Manda.

“The Architect, by the relationships which he creates he wakes in us profound echoes, he gives us the measure of an order which we feel to be in accordance with that of our world, he determines the various movements of our heart and of our understanding; it is then that we experience the sense of beauty.”

Le Corbusier

“I am covered in skin
No one gets to come in
Pull me out from inside
I am folded and unfolded and unfolding
I am colorblind.”

Colorblind, Counting Crows Recommended by Shay.

“All the blue light reflections color my mind when I sleep
And the lovesick rejections that accompany the company I keep
All the razor perceptions that cut just a little too deep
Hey, I can bleed as well as anyone but I need someone to help me sleep.”

Mrs. Potter's Lullabye, Counting Crows Recommended by Shay.

“If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts.”

Mrs. Potter's Lullabye, Counting Crows

“...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

“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

“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

“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.

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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