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Book: Girlfriend in a Coma
Quotes of Book: Girlfriend in a Coma

Douglas Coupland _ Girlfriend in a Coma
This past year - if you'd have tried, you'd have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people. || A thousands years ago this wouldn't have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids sand. One hundred years ago - or even fifty years ago - the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. the only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That's why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It's because Earth is now totally ours.
book-quote nature future humans
Douglas Coupland _ Girlfriend in a Coma
How many of us have a love so true it spans eternity? A purity of need so clear it can remain strong in the face of all that the world throws at us? Thisis Karen Ann McNeil, the woman who fell to Earth, the woman for whom the people in her life never gave up waiting.
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Douglas Coupland _ Girlfriend in a Coma
I have always noticed in high school yearbooks the similarity of all the graduate write-ups-how, after only a few pages, the identities of all the unsullied young faces blur, how one person melts into another and another: At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities-to clarify just who it is we really are?
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Douglas Coupland _ Girlfriend in a Coma
Ask questions, no, screech questions out loud - while kneeling in front of the electric doors at Safeway, demanding other citizens ask questions along with you - while chewing up old textbooks and spitting the words onto downtown sidewalks - outside the Planet Hollywood, outside the stock exchange, and outside the Gap. Grind questions onto the glass on photocopiers. Scrape challenges onto old auto parts and throw them off bridges so that future people digging in the mud will question the world, too. Carve eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe leathers so that your every trail speaks of thinking and questioning and awareness. Design molecules that crystallize into question marks. Make bar codes print out fables, not prices. You can't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has a question mark stamped on it - a demand for people to reach a finer place"
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Douglas Coupland _ Girlfriend in a Coma
It's what makes us different from every other creature in the world - we have time. And we have choices
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Douglas Coupland _ Girlfriend in a Coma
The new world lies before her eyes like an opened chest of treasure, a flock of birds over Africa, a thousand TVs all playing at once.
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Douglas Coupland _ Girlfriend in a Coma
One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild-into its ancestral sea-its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end
book-quote world fear excitement
Douglas Coupland _ Girlfriend in a Coma
What I notice is that everybody's kind of accusing everybody else of actingthese days. Know what I mean? Kind of, uh, not being genuine. Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.
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Douglas Coupland _ Girlfriend in a Coma
I thought I was going to see God or reach an epiphany or to levitate or something. But I never did. I prayed so long for that tohappen. I think maybe I didn't surrender myself enough - I think that's the term: surrender. I still wanted to keep a foot in both worlds. And then thispast year I've still been waiting for the same bigcosmic moments, and still nothing's happened...
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Douglas Coupland _ Girlfriend in a Coma
There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now. Maybe it's just because I'm with an older gang now.{...}I mean nobody even has hobbies these days. Not that I can see. Husbands and wives both work. Kids are farmed out to schools and video games. Nobody seems able to endure simply being themselves, either - but at the same time they're isolated. People work much more, only go home and surf the Internet and send e-mail rather than calling or writing a note or visiting each other. They work, watch TV, and sleep. I see these things. The world is only about work: work work work get get get...racing ahead...getting sacked from work...going online...knowing computer languages...winning contracts. I mean, it's just not what I would have imagined the world might be if you'd asked me seventeen years ago. People are frazzled and angry, desperate about money, and, at best, indifferent to the future.
book-quote work future today
Douglas Coupland _ Girlfriend in a Coma
Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience.
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Douglas Coupland _ Girlfriend in a Coma
I don't think human beings were meant to know so much about the world. All this time and all thisexposure to every conceivable aspect of life - wisdom so rarely enters the picture. We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and thenwe become bitter and isolated as we age.
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