"I looked at her and a voice inside me said, we only see starlight because all the stars are bleeding."
— Steven Hall (The Raw Shark Texts)

""It's tiring not knowing people isn't it?" Clio said later.

"It isn't word efficient," I agreed."
— Steven Hall (The Raw Shark Texts)

"There's nothing about the times when she wasn't funny or sexy, or when she talked too much or about her pissing or shitting. There's no way to really preserve a person when they're gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth, it's just a story."
— Steven Hall (The Raw Shark Texts)

"You save yourself or you remain unsaved."
— Alice Sebold

"Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained."
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow."
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort.

So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. "
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand"
— Alice Sebold (Lucky)

"Your first kiss is destiny knocking."
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her."
— Jonathan Franzen (The Discomfort Zone)

"How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes."
— Jonathan Franzen

"TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public."
— Douglas Coupland (JPod)

"All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next."
— Douglas Coupland

"Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy."
— Douglas Coupland (Life After God)

"Adventure without risk is Disneyland"
— Douglas Coupland

"In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where two people can finish each other's sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week. "
— Douglas Coupland

"...blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos. "
— Douglas Coupland (All Families Are Psychotic)

"I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints....I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does."
— Douglas Coupland

"As I'm never going to be old, I'm glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness."
— Douglas Coupland (Hey Nostradamus!)

""I am going to give you a piece of advice...advice I wish I'd been told in guidance class back in high school, in between the don't-do-acid and don't-drink-and-drive films. I wish our counselors had told us, 'When you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you. It's called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don't. Here is the list of the symptoms, and don't worry—loneliness is the most universal sensation on the planet. Just remember one fact—loneliness will pass. You will survive and you will be a better human for it.'""
— Douglas Coupland (Shampoo Planet)

"Only the disenfranchised can party with abandon."
— Douglas Coupland

"A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal."
— Douglas Coupland (The Gum Thief: A Novel)

"A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age - regardless of how they look on the outside - pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives."
— Douglas Coupland (The Gum Thief: A Novel)

""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 (Life After God)

"...we're told by TV 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 simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes."
— Douglas Coupland (The Gum Thief: A Novel)

"I thought about 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. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no animal equivalent were smoking, body-building and writing. That's not much, considering how special we seem to think we are."
— Douglas Coupland

"Figure our what it is you don't do very well, and then don't do it. I'm not beating myself up about doing everything perfectly. The litmus test I always use for myself is: "Okay, if you won 20 million tomorrow in the lottery would you still being doing the same thing you are doing now with your life, Dough? The answer is "yes". I'm always very conscious of that."
— Douglas Coupland

"I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts."
— Douglas Coupland (The Gum Thief: A Novel)

"I think if human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. Wouldn't life be more interesting that way? And now that I think about it, why the heck don't they? Who made the rule that everybody has to dress like sheep 364 days of the year? Think of all the people you'd meet if they were in costume every day. People would be so much easier to talk to - like talking to dogs. "
— Douglas Coupland (The Gum Thief: A Novel)

"Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers!""
— Douglas Coupland (Girlfriend in a Coma)

"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 (Life After God)

"The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be healing -- a blanket -- the comfort of a friend. Without at least some rain in any given day, or at least a cloud or two on the horizon, I feel overwhelmed by the information of sunlight and yearn for the vital, muffling gift of falling water."
— Douglas Coupland (Life After God)

"I watch these kids.
They don't seem entirely unhappy. A few times I've even circled the Free Clinic on foot, trying to catch a closer glimpse of these kids and their lives as they pop in and out of the clinic's Sputnik-era, gone-to-seed building--Lancaster's future trolls and Popeyes loitering out back having hushed paranoid conversations. And once I even went to have a look where they hang out in a big way, out in the delivery bay behind the now-closed Donut Hut, the delivery bay grotto out back with a floor spongy with pigeon shit, chewing gum, cigarette ashes, and throat oysters--dank and sunless. I went to visit this place once when all the druggies were away, having their druggy lives downtown doing their druggy things: yelling at parked cars and having conversations with amber lights. I visited this place and I was confused: confused and attracted. Who do these people think they are? How can they not care about the future or hot running water or clean sheets or cable TV? These people. And on the walls down at the delivery bay, do you know what they had written? Written in letters several hands high, letters built of IV needles attached to the cement with soiled bandages and wads of chewing gum? They had written the words WE LIKE IT."
— Douglas Coupland

"Question: If there were two of you which one would win?"
— Douglas Coupland

"She went crazy with a calm face,
justifiably so."
— Douglas Coupland

"At least when you're young you're also stupid."
— Douglas Coupland (Hey Nostradamus!)

"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"In heaven, all the interesting people are missing."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche