Douglas Coupland

“Anti-sabbatical: A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions”

“You know, I really think that when God puts together families, he sticks his finger into the white pages and selects a group of people at random and then says to them all, 'Hey! You're going to spend the next seventy years together, even though you have nothing in common and don't even like each other. And, should you not feel yourself caring about any of this group of strangers, even for a second, you will just feel dreadful”

“Ethan and I drove around Silicon Valley today looking at various company parking lots to see whose workers are working on a Sunday. He says that's the surest way to tell which company to invest in. "If the techies aren't grinding, the stock ain't climbing.”

“You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.”

“Q: If you could be an animal, what kind of animal would you be?A: You already are an animal.”

“-a feeling at once destructive, romantic, and grand-like falling into a swimming pool dressed in a tuxedo.”

“I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom.”

“Sometimes you can't realize you're in a bad mood until another person enters your orbit.”

“Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.”

“I think of how people can betray me simply by not caring enough to hide the fact of how little they care.I think of how the person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.”

“We're all born lost, aren't we? We're all born separated from God - over and over life makes sure to inform us of this - and yet we're all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must. ”

“The heart of a man is like deep water”

“I cry because the future has once again found its sparkle and has grown a million times larger. And I cry because I am ashamed of how badly I have treated the people I love–of how badly I behaved during my own personal Dark Ages–back before I had a future and someone who cared for me from above. It is like today the sky opened up and only now am I allowed to enter”

“What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.”

“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.”

“I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.”

“Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.”

“Abe: Wise hermit cast adrift on asteroid for thousands of years; has developed odd code languages for everyday actions; lonely but not bitter; his heart is cryogenically frozen, and he must search the universe pursuing the Thawer.”

“Well, it’s amazing what you can find in this world if you’re willing to sleep with people.”

“Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now.”

“Death without the possibility of ever changing the world is the same as a life that never was.”

“there are three things we cry for in life: things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.”

“She went crazy with a calm face,justifiably so.”

“With Jason I thought I'd finally played my cards right, and now I'm just one more of thosebroken, sad people out there, figuring out a year in advance where they can have Easter andChristmas dinner without feeling like a burden or duty to others, cursing the quality of modernmovies because it's so hard to fill weeknights with movies when they're all crap, and waiting, justwaiting, for those three drinks a night to turn into four - and then, well, then I'll be applying mymakeup in the morning, combing my hair, washing my clothes, but it's not really for anyone. I'malive, but so what.”

“After my brush with the suicidal impulse, I listen with new ears to others when theyspeak on the subject. I think there are people who were born with that little door open, and theyhave to go through life knowing that they might jump through it at any moment.”

“Once he entered my life, I promptly forgot all my years of putting on a brave face while browsingat bookstores until closing time, and of having one, two, three beers while watching crime showsand CNN. I completely forgot the hateful sensation of loneliness, like thirst and hunger togetherpressing on my stomach.”

“So where do you start when you want to start your life again?”

“Here's what I think: the five mostunattractive traits in people are cheapness, clinginess, neediness, unwillingness to change andjealousy. Jealousy is the worst, and by far the hardest to conceal.”

“and we had just invented the first of a set of what I would call fusion entities - characters, that could only exist when the two of us weretogether”

“Jason said, "Yes. Gerard T. Giraffe."What does the 'T' stand for?" 'The.”

“I was sick of wanting money. I was sick of being without a goal.”

“My brain feels like a cool, deep lake.”

“Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that He created anorder for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles,we're also asking that He unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracleswould be a cartoon, not a world.”

“Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is justsomething we haul into the grave.”

“All systems have failed me. In fiveminutes I'll be fine again for a while, but right now the inside of my head feels like NiagaraFalls without the noise, just this mist and churning and no real sense of where earth ends andheaven begins.”

“Do you ever just want to take your car out onto the highway and gun the engine as fastas you can and then close your eyes and see what happens?”

“It's around midnight. After I left Dad, my choice was to either become very drunk or write this. Ichose to write this. It felt kind of now-or-never for me.”

“I'll pour Drāno on your grave, you sick bastard.”

“But in that one little window of time, many lastingdecisions were made. First, any love for my father that might have remained either in mymother's heart or my own - vaporized. Second, we knew for sure that Dad was unfixably nuts.”

“what I remember is the silence in spite of the noise. In my head itmight just as well have been a snowy day in the country.”

“I felt like I was walking on an airport's rubber conveyor belt.”

“I think God is how you deal with everything that's out of your own control.”

“If I've learned anything in twenty-nine years, it'sthat every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70percent of his or her radar. My gift - bad choice of words - is that I can look at you, him, her,them, whoever, and tell right away what is keeping them awake at night: money; feelings ofinsignificance; overwhelming boredom; evil children; job troubles; or perhaps death, in one of itsmany costumes, perched in the wings. What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such anarrow range of plights defines our moral lives.”

“There are a number of things a woman can tell about a man who is roughly twenty-nine years old,sitting in the cab of a pickup truck at 3:37 in the afternoon on a weekday, facing the Pacific,writing furiously on the back of pink invoice slips. Such a man may or may not be employed, butregardless, there is mystery there. If this man is with a dog, then that's good, because it means he'scapable of forming relationships. But if the dog is a male dog, that's probably a bad sign, becauseit means the guy is likely a dog, too. A girl dog is much better, but if the guy is over thirty, anykind of dog is a bad sign regardless, because it means he's stopped trusting humans altogether. Ingeneral, if nothing else, guys my age with dogs are going to be work.Then there's stubble: stubble indicates a possible drinker, but if he's driving a van or a pickuptruck, he hasn't hit bottom yet, so watch out, honey. A guy writing something on a clipboardwhile facing the ocean at 3:37 P.M. may be writing poetry, or he may be writing a letter beggingsomeone for forgiveness. But if he's writing real words, not just a job estimate or somethingbusiness-y, then more likely than not this guy has something emotional going on, which couldmean he has a soul.”

“Hi! I'm Ethan, I shop at Ikea. I bought a $300 dining suite and it took me three days to assemble!”

“John watched the pale black road, and he remembered a single moment during his time away in the wilderness. He wished he had told Doris about it-a single moment in Needles, California, months and months ago, facing west in the late afternoon. There had been a heavy rainstorm over just a small, localized patch of the desert, and from the patch beside it, a dust storm blew in. The sun caught the dust and the moisture in a way John had never seen before, and even though he knew it was backward, it seemed to him the sun was radiating black sunbeams down onto the earth, onto Interstate 40 and the silver river of endless pioneers that flowed from one part of the continent to the other. John felt that he and everybody in the New World was a part of a mixed curse and blessing from God, that they were a race of strangers, perpetually casting themselves into new fires, yearning to burn, yearning to rise from the charcoal, always newer and more wonderful, always thirsty, always starving, always believing that whatever came to them next would mercifully erase the creatures they'd already become as they crawled along the plastic radiant way.”

“Truth be told, John said, the one thing in this world I want more than anything else is a great big crowbar, to jimmy myself open and take whatever creature that's sitting inside and shake it clean like a rug and then rinse it in a cold, clear lake like up in Oregon, and then I want to put it under the sun to let it heal and dry and grow and sit and come to consciousness again with a clear and quiet mind.”

“As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.”

“I curled myself into a ball and cried quietly, doing that thing that only young people can do, namely, feeling sorry for myself. Once you're past thirty you lose that ability; instead of feeling sorry for yourself you turn bitter.”

“I don't understand beauty.”