“I didn't realize then that so much of being adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“there are three things we cry for in life: things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers!”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“You guys just wait and see. We'll stand taller than these mountains. We'll bare open our hearts for the world to grab. We'll see lights where there was dimness. We'll testify together to what we have seen and felt. Life will go on--all of us--crawling; stumbling, falling perhaps. But we will be the strong ones. Our hearts will shine brightly.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“There are three things we cry for in life - things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“Imagine you're a forty-year-old, Richard," Hamilton said to me around this time, while working as a salesman at a Radio Shack in Lynn Valley,"and suddenly somebody comes up to you saying, 'Hi, I'd like you to meet Kevin. Kevin is eighteen and will be making all of your career decisions for you.' I'd be flipped out. Wouldn't you? But that's what life is all about - some eighteen-year-old kid making your big decisions for you that stick for a lifetime." He shuddered.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“Besides, animals don’t even have time. Only humans have time. It’s what makes us different.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?
-Richard”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“We'll go to a place that's quiet and dry and talk about precious things.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“Question: would I do it the same way all over again? Absolutely - because I learned something along the way. Most people don't learn things along
the way. Or if they do, they conveniently forget those things when it suits their need. Most people, given a second chance, fuck it up completely. It's
one of those laws of the universe that you can't shake. People, I have noticed, only seem to learn once they get their third chance - after losing and
wasting vast sums of time, money, youth, and energy you name it. But still they learn, which is the better thing in the end.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“I don't think human beings were meant to know so much about the world. All this time and all this
exposure to every conceivable aspect of life - wisdom so rarely enters the picture. We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then
we become bitter and isolated as we age.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“You know, from what I've seen, at twenty you know you're not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you're not going to be a dentist or a professional. And by thirty, a darkness starts moving in - you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing the rest of your life; you become resigned to your fate.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“My arm draped her shoulder; we both felt safe, as if we were a complete solar system unto ourselves, dangling in the sky, warm heated planets inside a universe of stars.
-Richard”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“The new world lies before her eyes like an opened chest of treasure, a flock of birds over Africa, a thousand TVs all playing at once.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“I thought I was going to see God or reach an epiphany or to levitate or something. But I never did. I prayed so long for that to
happen. I think maybe I didn't surrender myself enough - I think that's the term: surrender. I still wanted to keep a foot in both worlds. And then this
past year I've still been waiting for the same big
cosmic moments, and still nothing's happened...”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“What I notice is that everybody's kind of accusing everybody else of actingthese days. Know what I mean? Kind of, uh, not being genuine. Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“Ask questions, no, screech questions out loud - while kneeling in front of the electric doors at Safeway, demanding other citizens ask questions along with you - while chewing up old textbooks and spitting the words onto downtown sidewalks - outside the Planet Hollywood, outside the stock exchange, and outside the Gap. Grind questions onto the glass on photocopiers. Scrape challenges onto old auto parts and throw them off bridges so that future people digging in the mud will question the world, too. Carve eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe leathers so that your every trail speaks of thinking and questioning and awareness. Design molecules that crystallize into question marks. Make bar codes print out fables, not prices. You can't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has a question mark stamped on it - a demand for people to reach a finer place”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“I have always noticed in high school yearbooks the similarity of all the graduate write-ups—how, after only a few pages, the identities of all the unsullied young faces blur, how one person melts into another and another: Susan likes to eat at Wendy’s; Donald was on the basketball team; Norman is vain about his varsity sweater; Gillian broke her arm on Spring Retreat; Brian is a car nut; Sue wants to live in Hawaii; Don wants to make a million and be a ski bum; Noreen wants to live in Europe; Gordon wants to be a radio deejay in Australia. At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities—to clarify just who it is we really are?”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“It's what makes us different from every other creature in the world - we have time. And we have choices”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild-into its ancestral sea-its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“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. Maybe it's just because I'm with an older gang now.[...]I mean nobody even has hobbies these days. Not that I can see. Husbands and wives both work. Kids are farmed out to schools and video games. Nobody seems able to endure simply being themselves, either - but at the same time they're isolated. People work much more, only go home and surf the Internet and send e-mail rather than calling or writing a note or visiting each other. They work, watch TV, and sleep. I see these things. The world is only about work: work work work get get get...racing ahead...getting sacked from work...going online...knowing computer languages...winning contracts. I mean, it's just not what I would have imagined the world might be if you'd asked me seventeen years ago. People are frazzled and angry, desperate about money, and, at best, indifferent to the future.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“Dacă am fi avut convingeri, oare am fi avut măcar curajul să le urmăm?”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“How many of us have a love so true it spans eternity? A purity of need so clear it can remain strong in the face of all that the world throws at us? This
is Karen Ann McNeil, the woman who fell to Earth, the woman for whom the people in her life never gave up waiting.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“This past year - if you'd have tried, you'd have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people. || A thousands years ago this wouldn't have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids sand. One hundred years ago - or even fifty years ago - the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. the only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That's why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It's because Earth is now totally ours.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“Ну почему именно мы? Ну почему, например, не индийский продавец риса, скажем, из Лахора, средних лет, вдобавок сифилитик и коллекционер беличьих чучел.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
“I've been thinking about this so much. When I say time I mean history, or... I think it's human to confuse history with time.”
“That's for sure.”
“No, listen. Other animals don't have time – they're simply part of the universe. But people– we get time and history. What if the world had continued on? Try to imagine a Nobel Peace Prize winner of the year 3056, or postage stamps with spatulas on them because we ran out of anything else to put on stamps. Imagine the Miss Universe winner in the year 22,788. You can't Your brain can't do it. And now there are'nt any people. Without people, the universe is simply the universe. Time doesn't matter.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from Girlfriend in a Coma
Douglas Coupland
Born place: in CFB Baden-Söllingen, Germany
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“Don't let anyone take care of you. Can you maybe leave that for me to do? I mean, take care of you? Feel free to take care of me in return... because I think I'll need you to do that.”
― Melina Marchetta, quote from The Piper's Son
“Who here wants to be a writer?' I asked. Everyone in the room raised his hand. 'Why the hell aren't you home writing?' I said, and left the stage.”
― Leon Uris, quote from QB VII
“So I have spent four years without touch and affection and without wanting any.
But now there is Christopher Shepherd, the boy who changed all the rules.”
― Jessica Park, quote from Left Drowning
“I believe we make our own destinies, every last one of us.”
― Morgan Rhodes, quote from Rebel Spring
“That was Jolene, cleaning up even when life was falling apart.”
― Kristin Hannah, quote from Home Front
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For Whom the Bell To...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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