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
“Eirikr lies on the table, staring into the night sky, staring at the uncountable stars that are shining brightly down on him.
What lives, he thinks, are lived by the men up there?
What do they do?
What do they believe?
What do they see?
Do they see me?
He wonder about them all, all the many lives that have been, and that will be, and wonders why they are not all the same, why they are what they are. It cannot be, he thinks, that when our life is run, we are done. There must be more to man than that, surely?
That we are not just one, but a multitude.”
― Marcus Sedgwick, quote from Midwinterblood
“only poetry could best fit into the vast emptiness created by men.”
― Manning Marable, quote from Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
“If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has: namely, collective wisdom.”
― James Surowiecki, quote from The Wisdom of Crowds
“Well, if you’re talking about love, why did you bring up cocaine?”
― Natalie Standiford, quote from How to Say Goodbye in Robot
“Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Letter from the Birmingham Jail
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