Shampoo Planet

I picked up this book because Ivy was posting really good quotations from it on Tumblr. True to my expectations, I did find a couple of gems. Though Douglas Coupland's fiction style is not entirely to my liking, it feels too real haha.

Without further ado:

I have this feeling no room is ever really quiet; this feeling that even in the quietest, emptiest and most uneventful of rooms there is always an event of profound importance occurring. This event is Time itself, foaming, raging, and boiling like a river, roaring through this room and through all rooms [...] and Time, with its grand, unfightable sweep, taking me along with it.

I think about how I think I know a person the poof! I discover I only knew a cartoon version. Suddenly there's this fleshy, demanding, noisy creature in front of me, unknowledgeable and just as lost as I am, and equally unable to remember that every soul in the world is hurting, not just themselves.

I think of how people can betray me simply by not caring enough to hide the fact of how little they care.

In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as through we are spellcast. We speak in sentenced that end before finishing. We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone. We bump into others and feel bashful at recognizing souls so similar to ourselves.

Our achievements may make us interesting, Tyler, but our darkness makes us lovable. [...] Beauty and darkness are woven together, even Frankenstein gets lonely. [...] forgiveness is what we have no choice but to work towards, or else we are just animals. Dark animals. And that is too much to bear.

And I am fuelled by the awareness of all the badness in this world - badness I have tolerated because I had never chosen to see it for what it was. And I am fuelled by my embarrassment at my profoundly mistaken belief that simply living in freedom in itself guarantees the continuation of that freedom.

Yeah, "real" is a good word that summarizes the quotations above. 

The last quotation is something dear to me because I've acutely experienced this moment before. Twice before to be exact. In my case the relief did not come until long long after.

Once out on the sidewalk I had the distinct feeling that a point was being passed, a point after which, I might never again have the opportunity to say certain things to Anna-Louise with a certain level of intensity ever again. There was a sense of loss in this, but there was also relief.