"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)
"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)
"Or maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen’s bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn’t know even half the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning - and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it’s better to not know the lyrics to your life."
— The Gum Thief, Douglas Coupland (via foreigntide)
