Douglas Coupland: Feel

“Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.”

“I didn't realize then that so much of being adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience”

“Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me.”

“Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic.”

“I curled myself into a ball and cried quietly, doing that thing that only young people can do, namely, feeling sorry for myself. Once you're past thirty you lose that ability; instead of feeling sorry for yourself you turn bitter.”

“Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just
something we haul into the grave.”

“Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.”

“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 hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.”

“The two of you start talking about your feelings and your feelings float outside of you like vapors, and they mix together like a fog. Before you realize it, the two of you have become the same mist and you realize you can never return to being just a lone cloud again, because the isolation would be intolerable.”

“I have this feeling watching Jasmine - that as you grow older, it becomes harder to feel 100 percent happy; you learn all the things that can go wrong; you become superstitious about tempting fate, about bringing disaster upon your life by accidentally feeling too good one day.”

“Unlike Rachel, Player One has a complete overview both of the world and of time. Player One’s life is more like a painting than it is a story. Player One can see everything with a glance and can change tenses at will. Player One has ultimate freedom, the ultimate software on the ultimate hardware. That realm is also the one place where Player One feels, for lack of a better word, normal.”

“I'm beginning to feel like a microwaved egg that will explode if anybody so much as breathes onto the surface.”

“You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.”

“Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a series of events — a story — and when we can’t figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow.”

“We had all awakened X number of years past our youth feeling sleazy and harsh. Choices still existed, but they were no longer infinite. Fun had become a scrim, concealing the hysteria that lay behind it.”

“I'm trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition.”

“Don’t you get an empty feeling in your soul when you have a blank to-do list?”

“Chances are you feel superior to almost everyone you work with — however, they probably feel the same way about you.”

“Finally, my life was a story. My days would no longer feel like a video game that resets to zero every time I wake up, and then begs for coins.”