Douglas Coupland - Life After God (1994)

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Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounded like a quiet tragedy.

Douglas Coupland
One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.

Douglas Coupland
What exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human? There has to be something. How odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people.

Douglas Coupland
When you are young, you always expect that the world is going to end. And then you get older and the world still chugs along and you are forced to re-evaluate your stance on the apocalypse as well as your own relationship to time and death. You realize that the world will indeed continue, with or without you, and the pictures you see in your head. So you try to understand the pictures instead.

Douglas Coupland
Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me.

Douglas Coupland
We are changed souls; we don't look at things the same way anymore. For there was a time when we expected the worst. But then the worst happened, did it not? And so we will never be surprised again.

Douglas Coupland
Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures... And I think back over my life and I realize that my own nature -the core me- essentially hasn't changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.

Douglas Coupland
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
I thought that intimacy with another soul was the closest I could ever come to leaving my body.

Douglas Coupland
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.

Douglas Coupland
Time, Baby - so much, so much time left until the end of my life - sometimes I go crazy at how slowly time passes yet how quickly my body ages. But I shouldn't allow myself to think like this. I have to remind myself that time only frightens me when I think of having to spend it alone. Sometimes I scare myself with how many of my thoughts revolve around making me feel better about sleeping alone in a room.

Douglas Coupland
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.

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

Douglas Coupland
If cats were double the size they are now, they'd probably be illegal.

Douglas Coupland
I would like to fall in love again but my only hope is that love doesn't happen to me so often after this. I don't want to get so used to falling in love that i get curious to experience something more extreme - whatever that may be.

Douglas Coupland
Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

Douglas Coupland
I realized a capacity for not feeling lonely carried a very real price, which was the threat of feeling nothing at all.

Douglas Coupland
I mean five thousand years ago people emerge out of nowhere — sproing!— with brains and everything and begin wrecking the planet. You'd think we'd give the issue a little more thought than we do.

Douglas Coupland
Sometimes I think the people to feel the saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder – people who closed the door that leads us into the secret world –or who had the doors closed for them by time and neglect and decisions made in time of weakness

Douglas Coupland
Is feeling nothing the inevitable result of believing in nothing?... I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything.

Douglas Coupland
When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun—that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?

Douglas Coupland
When you're young you always feel that life hasn't yet begun... But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive.

Douglas Coupland
Our conversations are never easy, but as I-we-get older, we are finding that our conversations must bespoken. A need burns inside us to share with others what we are feeling Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic. It is as though the coolness that marked out youth is itself a type of retrovirus that can only leave you feeling empty. Full of holes.

Douglas Coupland
... 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.

Douglas Coupland
And then sometimes I think the people to feel saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder – people who closed the doors that leads us into the secret world – or who had the doors closed for them by time and neglect and decisions made in times of weakness.

Douglas Coupland