Douglas Coupland in Generation X
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"Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience."
Girlfriend in a Coma, by Douglas Coupland
"A highly competitive society must have simple rules and terrible consequences. There must be
losers on the edge to serve as cautionary tales for those in the center."
Douglas Coupland
"Exposing hypocrisy in itself doesn't make you a moral person."
Douglas Coupland
"...there was this woe-to-the-human-race silence you get from pendants
who think their talking to half-wits."
Douglas Coupland in Generation X
"We're not built for free time as a species. We think we are, but we aren't."
Douglas Coupland, Generation X
"Our parents' generation seems neither able nor interested in understanding
how marketers exploit them. They take shopping at face value."
Douglas Coupland, Generation X
"..when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will
ignore you...never champion your causes or feel sorry for you. It is the price
paid for day-today comfort and silence�.because of this all happiness is
sterile; all sadnesses go un-pitied."
Douglas Coupland, Generation X
"We live in an era of no historical precedents-history is no longer a useful tool in helping
us understand current changes. You can't draw parallels between then and now. They didn't have
Federal Express, 1-800 numbers, hip replacement surgery and pictures of the entire planet in
their heads."
Douglas Coupland, Miroserfs
"I guess the thing about exposing your heart is that people may not even notice it. Like a flop
movie. Or they'll borrow your heart and they'll forget to return it."
Douglas Coupland, Miss Wyoming
"What the aged can do with the past is enough to make your hair stand on end. But then look at the delusions that ordinary people have about the day before yesterday."
Phillip Roth in The Great American Novel
"Truth is. Belief is not required."
Gerry Roston
"Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas.
But Easter is the main event; If you don't believe in the resurection, you're not a believer.
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
"I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Voltaire
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent person suffer."
Sir William Blackstone
"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."
Gore Vidal
"There are no tricks in plain and simple faith."
Shakespeare
"Never explain--your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe you anyway."
Elbert Hubbard
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila."
Mitch Ratcliffe
"To be yourself, in a world that tries, night and day, to make you just like everybody else - is to fight the greatest battle there ever is to fight, and never stop fighting."
E.E. cummings
"Doing a thing well is often a waste of time."
Robert Byrne
"Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer."
Mark Twain
"In false quarrels there is no true valor."
William Shakespeare
"In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects."
J. W. Fulbright
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
Douglas Adams
"The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others."
William Lyon Phelps
"All good things are wild, and free."
Henry David Thoreau
"Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives."
William Dement
"People only see what they are prepared to see."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Whoever controls the media--the images--controls the culture."
Allen Ginsberg
"Culture owes its peak to weak political ages."
Nietsche
"I envy things on which a price tag cannot be put. I envy anyone who can do a backward
somersault in midair from a standing position. I envy people who speak foreign languages
easily...men who have fought a war and survived. I envy people who can travel abroad with a
single piece of carry-on luggage. I envy people who have good posture... Above all, I envy those
few people who truly understand that life is a fragile bargain, rescindable at any time by the
other party and live their lives accordingly. "
Joseph Epstein
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
Picaso
>"You've got to dance like nobody's watching,
And love like it's never going to hurt."
Tao
"Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all."
Arthur Balfour
"The greatest things in the world are those that neither men nor children can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there."
Francis P. Church
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
Aristotle
"Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years."
Richard Bach
"What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness."
Leo Tolstoy.
"The optimist claims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true."
James Branch Cabell
"To generalize is to be an idiot."
William Blake
"Wit is educated insolence."
Aristotle
"Violence is the last resort of the incompetent."
Salvor Hardin
"Courage is not defined by those who faught and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell, and rose again."
"Faith is believing in something you know isn't true."
Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
"The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well."
H. T. Leslie
Everybody's performing. We only think it's real."
Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
"Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it...It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more."
Erica Jong
""The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off."
Gloria Steinem
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."
Benjamin Franklin
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
George Bernard Shaw
"There are moments in life where anything you do or say is wrong, and
if you do nothing, that's wrong too."
L. Shames
"Genius is by definition unprecedented."
Wayne Johnston
"Whether or not virtue is it's own reward, sin is it's own punishment.
Jane Smiley in Moo
"At first sight of Rio de Janeiro instantly you forgive God for what's
visible of New Jersey."
Gregory McDonald in Fletch
"...practically everything is left up to chance,watch for those moments
when it is possible to play God-seize them. There won't be many."
John Irving, in The Cider House Rules
" I wanted strength, stamina, and speed-or, I desired their illusions."
John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire
"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero
of my own life, or whether that station will
be held by anybody else, these pages must show."
Dickens in David Copperfield
"Every Crown and every kingdom was won through deceit, war, theft and
bloodshed."
Mark Twain
"It is not necessary for them to be your moral equals in order for you
to learn something from them."
John Irving in Son of the Circus
"I could do worse than become the caretaker of my father's illusions."
John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire
"Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was the owner
had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else."
Joseph Heller, Catch 22
"Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some
men have mediocrity thrust upon them ."
Joseph Heller, Catch 22
-"They poisoned my food twice, didn't they?
- "They put poison in everybody's food."
- "And what difference does that make?"
Joseph Heller, Catch 22
"...it was one of those family events at which lives are measured and
compared and which are afterwards seem as marking off one era from
another."
Wayne Johnston, The Time of Their Lives
"...there was always a fearful mistrustful look about her, as if she
suspected that people understood her far better than she understood'
herself."
Wayne Johnston, The Time of Their Lives
"He laboured under the handicap of being mysterious without being fascinating."
Time Magazine on Nixon
"I lost the plot for a while then...the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission,
my popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign."
Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
"Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable becuase I listened to
music?"
Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
"You run the risk of losing anyone who is worth spending time with unless...you choose someone
unloseable...who could not possibly appeal to anybody else at all."
Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
"What matters is what you like, not what you are like."
Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
""You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away. You need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or location, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to."
While obsessing over being dumped, in High Fidelity
"Mother was perfect, and like most perfect people she was vastly
irritating."
Bill Richardson, Bachelor Brothers Bed & Breakfast
"Fond memory brings the light of other days around me."
"Moving through a dance floor thick with people requires a certain finesse.
A dance walk is required, since a normal walk breaks the collective behavior, and
this is rude."
Jim Monroe, Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gas Mask
"Like thin soups or weak coffee an under-attended party is a mockery
of a real thing."
Jim Monroe
"Most people never have to face up to the fact that they're capable,
given the right place, and the right time, of anything."
Jim Monroe
"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."
B. F. Skinner
"...box socials fill every human social need, mayhem being one of the
dominant social needs"
W.P. Kinsella
"Whenever you fall, pick something up."
Oswald Avery
"...at that moment, no price seemed too high to pay to get another human to shut up."
L. Shames
"When difficult things can't get done it's too bad. When easy things can't get done, and
there's no good reason it's more than too bad. It makes everything seem deep down mean and
petty."
Richard Russo, Straight Man
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