Douglas Coupland · 288 pages
Rating: (12.2K votes)
“All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from All Families are Psychotic
“...blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos. ”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from All Families are Psychotic
“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?”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from All Families are Psychotic
“This place is like some cosmic dream crusher. All you can get out of a place like this is a creepy little tingle that lets you know your kid is never going to be anything more than a customer-that the whole world is being turned into casino.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from All Families are Psychotic
“Okay, I know--my superpower--I'd be able to shoot lightening bolts out from my fingertips--great big knowledge network lightening bolts--and when a person was zapped by one of those bolts, they'd fall down on their knees and once on their knees, they'd be under water, in this place I saw once off the east coast of the Bahamas, a place where a billion electric blue fish swam up to me and made me a part of their school--and then they'd be up in the air, up in Manhattan, above the World Trade Center, with a flock of pigeons, flying amid the skyscrapers, and then--then what? And then they'd go blind, and then they'd be taken away--they'd feel homesick--more homesick than they'd felt in their entire life--so homesick they were throwing up--and they'd be abandoned, I don't know...in the middle of a harvested corn field in Missouri. And then they'd be able to see again, and from the edges of the field people would appear--everybody they'd known--and they'd be carrying Black Forest cakes and burning tiki lamps and boom boxes playing the same song, and they sky would turn into a sunset, the way it does in Walt Disney brochure, and the person I zapped would never be alone or isolated again.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from All Families are Psychotic
“The stories in books hate the stories in newspapers, David's mother would say. Newspaper stories were like newly caught fish, worthy of attention only for as long as they remained fresh, which was not very long at all. They were like the street urchins hawking the evening editions, all shouty and insistent, while stories- real stories, proper made-up stories-were like stern but helpful librarians in a well-stocked library. Newspaper stories were as insubstantial as smoke, as long-lived as mayflies. They did not take root but were instead like weeds that crawled along the ground, stealing the sunlight from more deserving tales.”
― John Connolly, quote from The Book of Lost Things
“We're all fools," said Clemens, "all the time. It's just we're a different kind each day. We think, I'm not a fool today. I've learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we're not perfect and live accordingly.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The Illustrated Man
“Hey, Alec," he said.
The man was on his hands and knees, leaning his face into the middle of a bush; he grunted something that kind of sounded like a "Yeah?"
"Why are we spending so much time on this side of where we left them?"
Alec pulled himself out of the bush and looked back at him. "Seemed logical. I'd think they either followed us out of here to find us, or they were taken by the same yahoos who attacked us. Or... maybe they went to investigate the fire."
Mark thought that was all barking up the wrong tree. "Or they ran away from the fire. Not every person on earth is as wacky-brained as you, good sir. Most people see a huge roaring inferno coming at them? They decide to cut and run. Just saying.”
― James Dashner, quote from The Kill Order
“If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from Rendezvous with Rama
“That's what I'll be. A silhouette, rarely seen, and yet believed in.”
― Ellen Hopkins, quote from Identical
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