Douglas Coupland Quotes

That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow we're all right. We go on.

If you had told me when I was 18 that I wouldn't have made it until I was 29, I would have said, Forget it.

When things happen to you in the worst way, you live with it, you go over it, you think, 'What else could I have done?'

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

I feel like a different person since my mum passed away, like I'm driving a ship with my husband alongside me and we're leading these four children into unknown waters.

From time to time, I'll look back through the personal journals I've scribbled in throughout my life, the keepers of my raw thoughts and emotions. The words poured forth after my dad died, when I went through a divorce, and after I was diagnosed with breast cancer. There are so many what-ifs scribbled on those pages.

Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.

You have people come into your life shockingly and surprisingly. You have losses that you never thought you'd experience. You have rejection and you have learn how to deal with that and how to get up the next day and go on with it.

I do a lot of lectures on survival. I always say you can't change what happened, so have a little wallow, feel very sorry for yourself, and then get up and move forward. You can't change what happened.

When any calamity has been suffered the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

As a novelist, I have always been interested in how people come to terms with difficult, life-altering events.

I think everybody has their pain. For me, the time that I really had to grow up was when I was 15 and I had my best friend die of leukemia. Watching somebody so strong go through that is definitely something that will give you a little bit of depth. There have been a lot of things that have happened in my life that has forced me to grow up.

Of course, losing my father was traumatic. I was an only child. But from the time my father died, my general theme in life has been to turn adversity into opportunity.

Losing my father at a tender age was extremely important in being able to accept what happened to me later when I became a quadriplegic.

Horrible things happen all our lives; we all experience loss and death and trauma. Usually, most people, I think, we just get on with it. We don't have a whole soliloquy in the middle of something.

Some families can experience terrible tragedy and deal with it, and others not. I find those things fascinating.

There have been bumps, but everything has happened for a reason - maybe apart from the loss of some loved ones - and we have always tried to find a positive from it.

When I think about my teenage years, when my parents broke up, and feeling alone and being out of control and having to survive... And then other times when you've had to find your own way... that's always been a dominant theme in what I've done.

I'd had to cope with a lot of death and illness in my family from a young age, and that maybe gave me a bleak outlook on the world.

My entire tenth grade year, my dad was in a coma. That changes a person. It changes a kid. It makes you ridiculously independent.

I lost my father when I was four, so maybe that was always in the background. Losing my brother kicked it into overdrive. When you get to such an intense place of suffering, you either have the choice to continue suffering or figure a way not to.

I always felt really lucky that I only lost my legs, because it could've been so much worse.

Pain is one of the unavoidable facts of life. We Bidens have had our share. We don't pretend otherwise. And we don't pretend that we are different from families all over America that have to face the loss of loved ones or have to deal with the fallout of divorces.

Within my first year of moving abroad living on my own, my sister got ill - she got cancer - and at the same time, my mum got cancer, and she passed away. I think at that time it was a hard challenge for me to deal with it, but in a way, I have always taken strength out of anything that has come at me.

Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way.