Jason D > Jason's Quotes

“TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.”
― Douglas Coupland, JPod

“Eroticize intelligence.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

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

“Part of the trick of being happy is a refusal to allow oneself to become too nostalgic for the heady triumphs of one's youth.”
― Larry McMurtry, Roads : Driving America's Great Highways

“A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age - regardless of how they look on the outside - pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.”
― Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

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

“As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.”
― Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

“Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.”
― Larry McMurtry, In a Narrow Grave : Essays on Texas

“All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.”
― Douglas Coupland, All Families are Psychotic

“Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“Adventure without risk is Disneyland.”
― Douglas Coupland

“Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.”
― Douglas Coupland

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

“It's starts out young- you try not be different just to survive- you try to be just like everyone else- anonymity becomes reflexive- and then one day you wake up and you've become all those other people- the others- the something you aren't. And you wonder if you can ever be what it is you really are. Or you wonder if it's too late to find out.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“Hasn't it been a long time since you had a flying dream?”
― Douglas Coupland, JPod

“I used the phrase 'a certain age.' What I mean by this is the age people are in their heads. It's usually thirty to thirty-four. Nobody is forty in their head. When it comes to your internal age, chin wattles and relentless liver spots mean nothing.”
― Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“But man is not made for defeat," he said. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints....I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does.”
― Douglas Coupland

“believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade.”
― Douglas Coupland

“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, Girlfriend in a Coma

“She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.”
― Marcel Proust

“Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.”
― Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove

“I was not unhappy, except one day at a time.”
― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, Part 2

“If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.”
― Larry McMurtry

“Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“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, Girlfriend in a Coma