Douglas Coupland cytaty

strona 6

„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.”

“Life is dull, but it could be worse and it could be better. We accept that a corporation determines our life’s routines. It’s the trade-off so that we don’t have to be chronically unemployed creative types, and we know it. When we were younger, we’d at least make a show of not being fooled and leave copies of Adbusters on our desktops. After a few years it just doesn’t matter. You trawl for jokes or amusingly diversionary. wav files. You download music. A new project comes along, then endures a slow-motion smothering at the hands of meetings. All ideas feel stillborn. The air smells like five hundred sheets of paper.
And then it’s another day.”

“Language is such a technology.”

“Clique Maintenance: The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: Kids today do nothing. They’re so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain.”

“Brazilification: The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.”

“Nobody has ever been happy in a job they obtained by first handing in a resumé.”

“Veal-Fattening Pen: Small, cramped office workstations built of fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions and inhabited by junior staff members. Named after the small preslaughter cubicles used by the cattle industry.”

“I tell you what: I give you all of my strength - I seal it inside a little green envelope and mail it to you with hope and peace and much much love. Take all you need and take it quickly.”

“There's nothing at the center of what we do.”

“Ethan is annoyed with all of these dumb campaigns that indoctrinate millions of people into thinking they’re tough-guy free spirits when, in fact, there’s probably much to be said for following and, in any event, the food chain isn’t structured to encompass millions of non-followers.”

“I don't want dainty little moments of insight …”

“We are at the vanguard of adolescent protraction.”

“I thought that intimacy with another soul was the closest I could ever come to leaving my body.”

“Doug's Law: "You can have information or you can have a life, but you can't have both."”

“As he ages and sees more of the world, he’s realizing that bad news is a part of life, and that when you have to give it, just say it and get it over with.”

“Yesirree, life sure is good.
Yesirree, nothing could possibly go wrong with everything being so good.
But of course, in books, good is boring.
Good is a snoozer.
Good makes people close the covers and never reopen them.
But you know—you'd think that just once when life finally started going my way, that cosmic writer out there would allow me and all of my co-characters to simply enjoy things for just a little while. I mean, what kind of a prick would end a book just when everything's going so well?”

“Let's go out and buy a statistically average meal from a large multinational restaurant chain. That usually fixes about seventy-five percent of life's problems.”

“I was wondering what electrons are actually doing when they sit in your hard drive in an old laptop at the back of your closet. I mean, how does an electron sit still — is it like a cartoon M&M learning back in a folding beach chair? Is it like an angry little steel ball bearing hovering there, just waiting to go nuts on protons? What’s the mechanism that starts and stops the electron? Who’s its dungeon master?”

“Bleeding Ponytail: An elderly sold out baby boomer who pines for hippie or pre-sellout days.”

“The heart of a man is like deep water.”

“The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything.”

“Is feeling nothing the inevitable result of believing in nothing? …I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything.”

“Is the hotel Marge? It has to be Marge. I want atmosphere.' Marge is Anna-Louise's word describing sad, 1950s-ish diner-type places where the waitresses are named Marge.”

“You feel chilled because you have no character. You’re a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you’re perpetually on the brink of being obsolete — whether it’s labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness. And it’s all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle. You’re glamorized drosophila flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim. If it isn’t a budget-driven eighteen-month game production schedule, it’s a five-year hardware obsolescence schedule. Every five years you have to throw away everything you know and learn a whole new set of hardware and software specs, relegating what was once critical to our lives to the cosmic slag heap.”

“Preemptive boringness. Being one-dimensional is the most satisfying method of coping with out-of-control people - with any situation that's out of control … Don't let people know the ideas you love, the games you've played, the places you've visited in your mind. Keep your treasure to yourself.”

“Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives? How hard can it be to change gears and say, "You know what? Instead of inventing and telling stories, I’m going to make my life a more interesting story."”

“"Ethan, there has to be more to my life than this."
"Why can't you just be happy as a shallow cartoon glyph of a human like everybody else here?"”

“I realized a capacity for not feeling lonely carried a very real price, which was the threat of feeling nothing at all.”

“When you're young you always feel that life hasn't yet begun…But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive.”

“We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age.”