Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.
Douglas CouplandRead
Anyway, I want to remember that love can happen. Because there is life after not having a life. I never expected love to happen. What was I expecting from life, then?
Interpretation
What this quote means
Love can unexpectedly appear in our lives, even after periods of despair.
This quote reflects the notion that love can arise when least anticipated, particularly after experiences of emptiness or lack of purpose. It emphasizes the transformative power of love and suggests that life's potential for joy continues, even after hardships.
Themes
LoveLifeTransformationExpectationHope
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about resilience, one might use this quote to illustrate that love can renew one's spirit.
More from Douglas Coupland
All quotes →...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.
Douglas CouplandRead
When the world throws you too much information, the only way you can stay sane or survive is to look for pattern recognition. Amidst all the blurs, is there a constellation that emerges, is there a straight line that's emerging?
Douglas CouplandRead
I'm not patient - and I'm getting more impatient as I get older - but I am disciplined about writing, and I want that on my tombstone: 'He wasn't patient, but he was disciplined.'
Douglas CouplandRead
If you waste five minutes of time a day, over the course of a year that adds up to one full work day. Think of five wasted minutes as a slow-release holiday drug. Savour it.
Douglas CouplandRead
When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they’re locked into jobs they hate; that they’re broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they’re fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It’s profoundly depressing.
Douglas CouplandRead
Similar quotes
The root of the matter is a very simple and old fashioned thing... love or compassion. If you feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide for action, a reason for courage, an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty.
Bertrand RussellRead
Perfect love is to feeling what perfect white is to color. Many think that white is the absence of color. It is not. It is the inclusion of all color. White is every other color that exists, combined. So, too, is love not the absence of an emotion (hatred, anger, lust, jealousy, covetousness), but the summation of all feeling. It is the sum total. The aggregate amount. The everything.
Neale Donald WalschRead
So if we love someone, we should train in being able to listen. By listening with calm and understanding, we can ease the suffering of another person. [True Love. A Practice for Awakening the Heart.]
Nhat HanhRead
If you were music I would listen to you ceaselessly And my low spirits would brighten up.
Anna AkhmatovaRead
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.
Fyodor DostoevskyRead
I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children's literature.
Jacqueline WoodsonRead