Generation X Quotes

“Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they’re locked into jobs they hate; that they’re broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they’re fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It’s profoundly depressing. ”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“After you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of earth? What one moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet. What's your takeaway? Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“Eroticize intelligence.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“Everybody has a ‘gripping stranger’ in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it’s the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library—a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying ‘Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,’ you’d follow them.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“There is no shame in impulse.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“Negative? Moi? I think realistic might be a better word. You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don't have maybe just the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere has gone very very cuckoo?”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“Q: If you could be an animal, what kind of animal would you be?

A: You already are an animal.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“Do you think we enjoy hearing about your brand-new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we're pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You'd last about ten minutes if you were my age these days.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“This was not a good idea coming home for Christmas. I'm too old. Years ago, coming back from schools or trips, I always expected some sort of new perspective or fresh insight about the family on returning. That doesn't happen anymore-the days of revelation about my parents, at least, are over... its time to move on. I think we'd all appreciate that.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective. Sometimes I'd just like to mace them. I want to tell them that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for blindly handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“You know, I really think that when God puts together families, he sticks his finger into the white pages and selects a group of people at random and then says to them all, 'Hey! You're going to spend the next seventy years together, even though you have nothing in common and don't even like each other. And, should you not feel yourself caring about any of this group of strangers, even for a second, you will just feel dreadful”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“So I came down here, to breathe dust and walk with the dogs-- to look at a rock or a cactus and know that I am the first person to see that cactus and that rock.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“I'd sooner have died than admit that the most valuable thing I owned was a fairly extensive collection of German industrial music dance mix EP records stored for even further embarrassment under a box of crumbling Christmas tree ornaments in a Portland, Oregon basement. So I told him I owned nothing of any value.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generatie X: vertellingen voor een versnelde cultuur

“You know, Dag and Claire smile a lot, as do many people I know. But I always wondered if there is something either mechanical or malignant to their smiles, for the way they keep their outer lips propped up seems a bit, not false, but protective. A minor realization hits me as I sit with the two of them. It is the realisation that the smiles that they wear in their daily lives are the same as the smiles worn by people who have been good-naturedly fleeced, but fleeced nonetheless, in public and on a New York sidewalk by card sharks, and who are unable because of social conventions to show their anger, who don't want to look like poor sports.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“What one moment from you defines what it’s like to be alive on this planet. What’s your takeaway?’’
There is silence. Tobias doesn’t get her point, and frankly, neither do I. She continues: ‘’Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don’t count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you’re really alive.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“I broke out into a sweat and the worlds of Rilke, the poet, entered my brain -- his notion that we are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“I walked far down a dirt side road and into a farmer's field - some sort of cereal that was chest high and corn green and rustled as its blades inflicted small paper burns on my skin as I walked through them. And in that field, when the appointed hour, minute, and second of the darkness came, I lay myself down on the ground, surrounded by the tall pithy grain stalks and the faint sound of insects, and held my breath, there experiencing a mood that I have never really been able to shake completely - a mood of darkness and inevitability and facination - a mood that surely must have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“Anti-sabbatical: A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“Dag insists that all dogs secretly speak the English language and subscribe to the morals and beliefs of the Unitarian church...”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“TERMINAL WANDERLUST: A condition common to people of transient middle-class upbringings. Unable to feel rooted in any one environment, they move continually in the hopes of finding an idealized sense of community in the next location.”
― Douglas Coupland, 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.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“MID TWENTIES BREAKDOWN: A period of mental collapse occurring in one’s twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one’s essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“I wonder that all things seem to be from hell these days: dates, jobs, parties, weather…Could the situation be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised heaving in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can’t help but suffer in comparison.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“Which is that there's too much weight improperly distributed: towers and elevators; steel, stone and cement. So much mass up so high that gravity itself could end up being warped--”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“But Dag, for all of his efforts, might as well have been talking to a cat. Our parents’ generation seems neither able nor interested in understanding how marketers exploit them. They take shopping at face value.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture