“Thought: one day the word ‘gigabits’ is going to seem as small as the word ‘dozen.’”
—
Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
March 2013
4 posts
“…randomness is a useful shorthand for describing a pattern that’s bigger than anything we can hold in our hands. ‘Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make.’”
—
Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
“It’s like male geeks don’t know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it’s a user interface problem. Not their fault. They’ll just wait for the next version to come out — something more ‘user friendly.’”
—
Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
“‘They’re called _emoticons_ — I read about them in _USA Today_. They’re like sideways happy faces.’ We all ganged up on her: ‘We _hate_ those things!’ Everyone except for Bug who, as it turns out, loves them. And then Susan ‘fessed up that she liked some of them. And then Todd. And then Karla. i guess emoticons are like _Baywatch_ — everyone says they don’t watch it, but they really do.”
—
Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
February 2013
2 posts
“She was fetal and I had my left hand underneath her feet and my right on top of her head. I cupped her closer and pressed her against my stomach and said, “You’re my baby now: you’re a thousand diamonds — a handful of lovers’ rings — chalk for a million hopscotch games.”
—
Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
“Q: If there were two of you which one would win?”
—
Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
January 2013
1 post
December 2012
3 posts
Toy Packaging
Sara Groves
Forgot about this little contribution to the holiday canon. Love it!
“
In my universe there are drinkers and dancers. And the two should never intermingle. I have always been with the drinkers, self-conscious introverts who crack wise about the music and sneer at the dancers while at the same time they are consumed with envy. Dancers love their bodies and open themselves to the music. Gravity is my enemy. It conspires with my body to make me look stupid on the dance floor. Why did she have to ask me to dance?
“I’d be happy to go to the dance,” I said and never took my eyes off the carpet.
” —John Straley, The Angels Will Not Care
“I wanted to tell him that this wasn’t my life here tangled up like half a mile of snarled fishing line in the trees. That this was just the story of my life. The story I was telling myself, and the story my friends told about me. But my life, my actual life, had to be somewhere else.”
—
John Straley, The Angels Will Not Care
Read this book a few months ago. Just finding these snaps of notes.
November 2012
1 post
“Susan was talking about art today, about that surrealist guy who painted little businessmen floating through the sky and apples that fill up entire rooms—Magritte. She said that if Surrealism was around today, ‘It’d last ten minutes and be stolen by ad agencies to sell long-distance calls and aerosol cheese products.’ Probably true.”
—Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
September 2012
6 posts
“Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”
—
F Scott Fitzgerald,
who was born this day in 1896
“In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.”
—Ernest Hemingway, True at First Light
“This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.”
—Ernest Hemingway, True at First Light
“I remember how when I was a boy the Chicago White Sox had a third baseman named Harry Lord who could foul off pitches down the third-base line until the opposing pitcher was worn out or it would get dark and the game be called. I was very young then and everything was exaggerated but I can remember it beginning to get dark, this was before there were lights in ballparks, and Harry still fouling them off and the crowd shouting, ‘Lord, Lord Save Your Soul.’ This was the closest I had ever come to the soul.”
—
Ernest Hemingway, True at First Light
(Harry Lord’s entry at baseball-reference.com)
“
‘But you don’t mean all writers are crazy?’
‘Only the good ones.’
” —Ernest Hemingway, True at First Light
“
But you can’t blame the liars because all a writer of fiction is really is a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men. I am a writer of fiction and so I am a liar too and invent from what I know and that I’ve heard. I’m a liar.
…
My excuse is that I make the truth as I invent it truer than it would be. That is what makes good writers or bad. If I write in the first person, stating it is fiction, critics now will still try to prove these things never happened to me. it is as silly as trying to prove Defoe was not Robinson Crusoe so therefore it is a bad book.
” —Ernest Hemingway, True at First Light