Welcome to the beta version of Shelfari’s new Book Detail pages!
These pages are editable by the community, so please contribute! Click here to learn more about this feature. We’d love to hear your feedback.
Description
“Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning... read more
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis
Memorable Quotes
-
“Corn is a fucking nightmare. A thousand years ago it was a stem of grass with one scuzzy little kernel; now it's a bloated, foot-long buttery carb dildo.”
Zack -
“I hate the way our bodies move through the world, clip-clop, like beef marionettes. I hate how the world has turned into one massive hamburger-making machine, how the world is only about people now—everything else on the planet must bow to our will because there's no longer any other option.”
Julien -
“…when something genuinely cosmic happens to you, your tendency is to believe the experience isn't real.”
Samantha -
“…sometimes not giving a shit keeps things lively. For example, a while back I went through this phase where I totally didn't give a rat's ass about anything, so just to mess things up, I wore eyeliner for a week, and raggedy old clothing. Net result: chick magnet. I'd go to convenience stores and hurl myself at the windows in an attempt to make them shatter…there's even some security-cam footage of it somewhere in flickr world. Net result: chick magnet plus cool reputation. There's a lot to be said for not giving two flying fucks, Mr. Darwin.”
Zack -
“Fame without the money to insulate you from it is one of the most wretched human conditions possible.”
Samantha -
“I guess that's what all sci-fi is about in the end: societies competing for survival.”
Julien -
“Finally my life was a story. My days would no longer feel like a video game that resets to zero every time I wake up, and then begs for coins.”
Julien -
“What a marvel to be among the fewest of few molecules in the universe allowed to experience this thing called life—stars and nebulas and black holes by the quadrillion, and yet only a few molecules on Earth get to be alive.”
Harj -
“Stories come from a part of you that only gets visited rarely—sometimes never at all. I think most people spend so much time trying to convince themselves that their lives are stories that the actual story-creating part of their brains hardens and dies. People forget that there are other ways of ordering the world.”
Serge -
“…why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives? How hard can it be to change gears and say, *You know what? Instead of inventing and telling stories, I'm going to make my life a more interesting story.*”
Diana -
“The only thing our diseased culture believes in is fame. No other form of eternity exists. Kill the famous and you kill the core of the diseased culture.”
Diana (story) -
“Six silent people in a room got me to thinking about the voice we hear in our heads when we read, the universal narrator's voice you may well be hearing right now. Whose voice *is* it you're hearing? It's not your own, is it? I didn't think so. It never is.”
Samantha -
“Bartholomew was obsessed with new additions to the language. He was particularly incensed by things that caused language to change or evolve. He worked as a copy checker for a large business magazine and spent his lunch hours and weekends writing acid-tipped hate mail to other magazines that incorporated any noun or verb that had entered the language since the dawn of digital culture. *Can't you see how you're diluting the language? Corrupting it! Tell me, what is a jpeg? What a sick and diseased and laughable word it is—it's not even a word! It's a sound effect; a glottal sideshow freak. It's a bastard word—a bearded lady of a word.*”
Julien (story) -
“Sir, when the humans read books, it gives them a sense of individuality, a sense of being unique—a sense that something about their existence is special or, as they like to say, 'magical.'”
Diana (story) -
“So many things begin and end with the sea, do they not? Sailors vanish. Boats sink. Jewels are thrown to its bottom. The bad woman drowns. Life crawls from its glinting waters and draws air into its lungs and joins the land forever.”
Harj
First Sentence
How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we use to knit together this place we call the world?
Table of Contents
Authors & Contributors
- Douglas Coupland (Author)
Popular Tags
Books with Additional Background Information
List the books that contain additional information about this book.
If you have any suggestions for how we can improve this page or if there are sections that you would like us to add, please let us know.
