Douglas Coupland Quotes

Rock bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable...Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It's a failure of vision, a failure to see the world as it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not some other way.

'Empire' was a very traumatic experience for me. It was very schizophrenic, and it wasn't what I expected it to be.

I just sort of lost my head for a little while.

Hopelessness is a really toxic and dangerous state.

When you commit your life to something and it doesn't work out, it is a tough place to be. Suicide can be the spiritual reprieve of a faithless person. I knew I could always just end it, and there was solace in that.

The gloom encroaches upon my mind, and my heart flutters like a bird held fast in a fist.

Just leave me alone. I'm not myself. I'm falling apart, and I don't want you here.

I shouldn't precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can't very well get out of it.

if he goes and dies on me now, I know I'll go completely insane.

Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn't see possibilities. Then came despair.

Her feelings she hides Her dreams she can't find She's losing her mind She's falling behind She can't find her place She's losing her faith She's falling from grace She's all over the place

It was impossible to sleep. Anxiety stopped me from falling asleep; depression woke me up.

The neurotic circles ceaselessly above a fogged-in airport.

Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.

I repeat his words in my head. What's going on? What's going on? Oh, well, since you asked, I got a bunch of tapes in the mail today from a girl who killed herself. Apparently, I had something to do with it. I'm not sure what that is, so I was wondering if I could borrow your Walkman to find out. 'Not much,' I say.

I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there's no relief in waking.

I didn't think my day could get any worse until my best friend told me she might be going crazy. Again.

Christ, how did you ever get this screwed up! his mind demanded of him. He knew the answer, but even that was not a full explanation. Different segments of the organism called John Terrance Kelly knew different parts of the whole story, but somehow they'd never all come together, leaving the separate fragments of what had ...once been a tough, smart, decisive and to blunder about in confusion - and despair! There was a happy thought.

my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.

Something really is wrong with me. And I don't know what it is.

When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something--anything--before it is all gone.

I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.

I was an emotional basket case.

It's crazy how you can get yourself in a mess sometimes and not even be able to think about it with any sense and yet not be able to think about anything else.

So being two different people in one day unnerved me to no end.