"I don’t understand the human heart. Only pain makes it grow stronger. Only sorrow makes it kind. Contentment makes it wither, and joy seems to build walls around it. The heart is perverse, and it is cruel. I hate the heart and it seems to hate me."
— The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland (via thechocolatebrigade)
"What is prayer but a wish for the events in your life to string together to form a story…something that makes some sense of events you know have meaning."
— Douglas Coupland, Generation A. (via potatospoon)
"And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it’s already happened. ” -Douglas Coupland"
— (via greyto)
"He told me that most people who come to arrange services don’t believe in anything. He said that if he’s learned anything from doing his job, it’s that if you don’t have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can’t expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis. He said we’re told by TV and movies and Reader’s Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change - and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simple feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. They become messes and tend to remain messes."
—
The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland
I really liked this passage in the book
(via let-it-beeeee)
"
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, but regardless, there is mystery there. If this man is with a dog, then that’s good, because it means he’s capable of forming relationships. But if the dog is a male dog, that’s probably a bad sign, because it means the guy is likely a dog, too. A girl dog is much better, but if the guy is over thirty, any kind of dog is a bad sign regardless, because it means he’s stopped trusting humans altogether. In general, 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 pickup truck, he hasn’t hit bottom yet, so watch out, honey. A guy writing something on a clipboard while facing the ocean at 3:37 P.M. may be writing poetry, or he may be writing a letter begging someone for forgiveness. But if he’s writing real words, not just a job estimate or something business-y, then more likely than not this guy has something emotional going on, which could mean he has a soul.
"—
Hey Nostradamus!, Douglas Coupland (via domesticabusewillsaveusall)
This is one of my most favorite books of all time…
405: what IS important? »
“We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there’s a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thought we’d have a bowel movement again….
- Taken from Generation X by Douglas Coupland.
LOVE this.
“My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.”
"
I saw doves and I thought they were rocks, but they were asleep. My
breath made them stir, and the rocks took flight, the earth exploding
… and my only thought was that I wanted you to see them, too
The man from Whirlpool came to fix the washer today, and he found
Black Widow spiders nesting underneath its broken engine, and he
showed me the web, and I found myself thinking of catching you, biting
you, spinning you within my limbs and setting you free
Don’t tell me this isn’t true.
Tell me you feel this fire.
"— “Microserfs” - Douglas Coupland (via theskyyends)
"One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend to care about them more than you really do."
— Douglas Coupland (via -xomfgsav)
"You fear that if you lower your guard for even one second your whole world will disintegrate into chaos"
— Douglas Coupland (via katherineritchie)
"Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?"
— Douglas Coupland - JPod (2006) (via jamesssl)
