Douglas Coupland cytaty

strona 5

„Ludzie najbardziej boją się myśli, że sami zaczną coś zmieniać w swoim życiu.”

„Ludzie zwykle cieszą się, kiedy w ich życiu zachodzą zmiany – znoszą katastrofy tak dzielnie, że nikt nie spodziewałby się tego po nich w zwykłych okolicznościach.”

„Ptaki udowadniają nam, że istnieje lepsze, prostsze życie, może nawet na wyciągnięcie ręki.”

„Bo kiedyś spodziewaliśmy się najgorszego. Ale potem najgorsze się przytrafiło, prawda? Więc już nigdy nas nie zaskoczy.”

„Człowiek to jedyne zwierzę, które potrafi odczuwać smutek rozłożony liniowo na osi czasu. Naszym przekleństwem jako gatunku jest, że zostaliśmy uwięzieni przez czas, że musimy interpretować życie jako szereg następujących po sobie wydarzeń, jako historię – i że kiedy nie potrafimy zrozumieć, na czym polega ta historia, czujemy się zagubieni.”

„Tylu ludzi nie ma teraz własnego życia, że naprawdę warto się zastanowić, czy przypadkiem nie powstaje nowy styl życia, i to na tak wielką skalę, że trudno już traktować to w kategoriach moralnych.”

„Czy często ktoś obcy ratuje nas z opresji? Czy w ogóle ktokolwiek kiedykolwiek nas ratuje? I jak to jest, że wycieka z nas cała zdolność do przebaczania i dobroci – tak z nas wycieka, że jeden drobny miłosierny uczynek pozostaje w pamięci na całe życie? W jaki sposób do tego dochodzimy? To właśnie sobie myślę, wspominając ogorzałą twarz włóczęgi spod Indio, kiedy zastanawiam się nad moim światem – jego twarz przekonuje mnie, że zawsze jest, w co wierzyć, gdy nie ma już, w co wierzyć. To twarz dla ludzi, takich jak ja, popchniętych na samą krawędź samotności, może nawet zepchniętych w dół, którzy, gdy wdrapali się z powrotem na górę, zobaczyli zupełnie już zmieniony świat.”

„Kiedy człowiek jest młody, ciągle wydaje mu się, że świat zaraz się skończy. Potem człowiek starzeje się, świat jakoś daje sobie radę, trzeba zrewidować swoje poglądy na apokalipsę i własny stosunek do życia i śmierci. Człowiek uświadamia sobie, że świat rzeczywiście będzie trwał dalej, czy z nim, czy bez niego, czy bez tego, co widzi w swojej głowie. I człowiek zaczyna próbować zrozumieć to, co tam widzi.”

“"Just go and feed yourselves on a wide array of products containing high-fructose corn sugar. Zheesh."
"That wasn't funny, Evil Mark. It sounded fake and hollow. You're terrible at being ironic, and you've been rehearsing that line, haven't you?"”

“Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs.”

“If you can control your emotions, chances are you don’t have too many.”

“Only damaged people want good things to happen to them through visualization. They want something for nothing.”

“Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.”

“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.”

“Her friends have become who they've become by default. Their dreams are forgotten, or were never formulated to begin with.”

“People like that woman make it clear just how asinine it is to believe that human beings have some kind of in-built universal sense of goodness. These days I think that everybody's just one spit away from being a mall bomber.”

“Meeting Anna-Louise was like finding a stranger's shopping list on the mall floor and realising there are other, more interesting diets than your own. It was the first time I ever felt incomplete.”

“We call Jasmine's room 'The Harem,' a sexy place, about which Dan never complained, even though his own possessions, his laptop PC and briefcase, for example, looked crazy in the environment, invasive and overcomplex, like Stealth bombers in SmurfWorld.”

“Your inability to achieve solitude makes you settle for substandard relationships.”

“The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I’m kidding. But killing helps.”

“We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there's a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thought we'd have a bowel movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better.”

“We have to count. I want to be part of history. I want a Wikipedia page. I want Google hits. I don’t want to be just a living organism that comes and goes and leaves no trace on this planet.”

“There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now.”

“It turns out that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony — which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value. I can’t imagine anything worse than that. Okay, maybe I can, but imagine reading the morning newspaper and believing it all to be true on some level.”

“Boomer Envy: Envy of material wealth and long-range material security accrued by older members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate births.”

“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.”

“I think about how I think I know a person then 'poof!' I discover I only knew a cartoon version. Suddenly there's this fleshy, demanding, noisy creature in front of me, unknowable and just as lost as I am, and equally unable to remember that every soul in the world is hurting, not just themselves.”

“Historical Slumming: The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural village -- locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back -- so as to experience relief when one returns back to “the present.””

“Scrape. Feel. Dig. Believe. Ask.”

“McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.”

“Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?”

“I hear that God has a really bad haircut.”

“The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we’ve started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.”

“You wilfully ignore the small, gentle observations in life which you know are the most important.”

“I told Ethan that I speak in an unrestricted manner to animals -- things like, aren't you just the cutest little kitty… that kind of thing, which I wouldn't dream of doing to humans. Then I realized I wish I could.”

“Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive.”