Douglas Coupland citations

Page 2

“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.”

“Jason once told me that eye contact is the most intimacy two people can have -- forget sex -- because the optic nerve is technically an extension of the brain, and when two people look into each other's eyes, it's brain-to-brain.”

“Question: If there were two of you which one would win?”

“As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.”

“Sometimes you can't realize you're in a bad mood until another person enters your orbit.”

“If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you? It'll still be happening to an unchanged person.”

“I saw doves and I thought they were rocks, but they were asleep. My breath made them stir, and they rocks took flight, the earth exploding… and my only thought was that I wanted you to see them, too.”

“I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I've realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.”

“Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now.”

“Only the disenfranchised can party with abandon.”

“As I'm never going to be old, I'm glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness.”

“A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age - regardless of how they look on the outside - pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.”

“Do you ever just want to take your car out onto the highway and gun the engine as fast
as you can and then close your eyes and see what happens?”

“I would like to fall in love again but my only hope is that love doesn't happen to me so often after this. I don't want to get so used to falling in love that i get curious to experience something more extreme - whatever that may be.”

“One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.”

“There is no shame in impulse.”

“Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.”

“If he'd learned one thing while he'd been away, it was that loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears out a room.”

“Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words.”

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

“Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make.”

“Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (…) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.”

“Happy. And then I got afraid that it would vanish as quickly as it came. That it was accidental-- that I didn't deserve it. It's like this very, very nice car crash that never ends.”

“We're all born lost, aren't we? We're all born separated from God - over and over life makes sure to inform us of this - and yet we're all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must.”

“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.”

“People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity. (from inside the cover)”

“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.”

“The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder.”

“What is human behavior, except trying to prove that we're not animals?”