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Quote by Douglas Coupland

“SAFETY NET-ISM: The belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life's hurts. Usually parents.”

Quote by Douglas Coupland

Author

Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist born on December 30, 1961. His works depict the complexity of modern society with a unique perspective and style, particularly focusing on personal identity, consumer culture, and technological development. His notable works include 'Generation X' and 'Shitty Millennial'. more

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“Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective.”

Giving Use Parent Perspective Jimmy

Book:Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Source: Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“I am reminded that no matter how hard you try, you can never be more than twelve years old with your parents. Parents earnestly try not to inflame, but their comments contain no scale and a strange focus. Discussing your private life with parents is like misguidedly looking at a zit in a car's rearview mirror and being convinced, in the absence of contrast or context, that you have developed combined heat rash and skin cancer.”

Trying Years Matter Hard Parent Focus Car Strange Skins Mirrors Cancer Convinced Absence Scales Heat Comment Contrast Twelve Private Life Discussing Rearview Mirror Zits Skin Cancer

Author:Douglas Coupland

“OPTION PARALYSIS: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.”

Choices Given Tendencies Unlimited Paralysis

Author:Douglas Coupland

“Strange how when you're young you have no memories...Then one day you wake up and BOOM, memories overpower all else in your life, forever making the present moment seem sad and unable to compete with a glorious past that now has a life of its own.”

Moments Seems Past Young Memories Forever Strange One Day Wake Up Glorious Present Moment No Memory

Book:Polaroids from the Dead

Source: Polaroids from the Dead

“If you're not spending every waking moment of your day radically rethinking the nature of the world-if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order-then you're wasting your day.”

Ifs World Moments Order Spending Waking Boiling Rethinking

Author:Douglas Coupland

“There is a myth that the purpose of education is to give one the means for upward mobility and success. The plain truth is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does need desperately more peacemakers, healers, restorers, story tellers, and lovers of every shape and form.”

People Needs Giving Mean Doe Stories Form Purpose Successful Planets Lovers Truth Is Shapes Myth Successful People Healer Mobility Peacemaker Purpose Of Education Upward Mobility

Author:David W. Orr

“There's nothing at the center of what we do...No center. It doesn't exist. All of us-look at our lives: We have an acceptable level of affluence. We have entertainment. We have a relative freedom from fear. But there's nothing else.”

Looks Levels Our Lives Entertainment Relative Acceptable Affluence

Author:Douglas Coupland

“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.”

“What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation.”

“And in your new lives you'll have to live entirely for that one sensation-that of imminent truth. And you're going to have to holler for it, steal for it, beg for it-and you're never to stop asking questions about it twenty-four hours a day, the rest of your life.”

Hours Four Twenties Asking Stealing Sensations New Life Rest Of Your Life Asking Questions

Author:Douglas Coupland