Quotes About Transition

Douglas Coupland

As far as I can see, Janet, life is just an endless banquet of loss, and each time a new loss is doled out, you have to move your mental furniture around, throw things out, and by then there's more loss, and the cycle goes on and on. (All Families are Psychotic.)

Microserfs (1995) p28 'He's thinking of quitting [Microsoft] to be a pixelation broker, going around to museums to digitize their paintings

I felt like I was walking on an airport's rubber conveyor belt.

Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long

Today was the first day when I could really tell that summer was over. The cold air sparkled and the maple leaves were rotting, putting forth their lovely reek, like dead pancakes.

Once you've used your brain flat-out, you can't go into the SLOW mode. You can't drive an Infinite J-3B and then get downgraded to an Daewoo. Brains don't workd that way.

we started talking more about all of the fiftysomethings being dumped out of the economy by downsizing. No one knows what to do with these people, and it's so sad, because being 50 nowadays isn't like being 50 a hundred years ago when you'd probably be dead.

What about life after death? What about death after life after death?

The Israelites of Exodus were a people on the go, not a people who had yet arrived at their ultimate destination.

No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.

Sometimes, a society can see its end approaching from afar and still not be able to adapt, like the Maya; at other times, the curtain drops without warning and the show is over.

Don't live in the past—you will know what you've lost but not what you've found?

The moment of change is the only poem

Just as your lungs breathe in and then breathe out, it's necessary for things to fall away so that life can breathe new again. This is one of the laws of the universe: that everything you see, taste, touch, and feel will eventually disappear back into the source from which it came, only to be reborn and appear yet again, receding again back into the source..

For a single path leads to the house of Hades.

He that is discontented in one place will seldom be content in another.

Don't be in a hurry to change one evil for another.

When the music changes, so does the dance

How absurd to call youth the time of happiness - youth, the time of greatest vulnerability! - Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile

In the midst of life, we are in death.

I learned (what I suppose I really knew already) that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back—that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a One Way Street, isn't it?

Youth is a failing only too easily outgrown.

I love autumn. It's so much richer than spring.