Sculptors

"Finally, my life was a story. My days would no longer feel like a video game that resets to zero every time I wake up, and then begs for coins. (p. 143)"

"There was a fifteen-second patch of silence, then Craig said, 'Isn't it weird that Hotmail accounts still exist?' 'It really is,' said Bev. (p. 222)"

"Truly modern citizens are both charismatic and can only respond to other people with charisma. To survive, people need to become self-branding charisma robots. Yet, ironically, society mocks and punishes people who aspire to that state."

"The hardest things in the world are being unique and having your life be a story. In the old days, it was much easier, but our modern fame-driven culture, with its real-time 24-7 marinade of electronic information, demands a lot from modern citizens, and poses great obstacles to narrative."

"SOLON CR is indicated for the short-term treatment of psychological unease grounded in obsession with thinking about the near and distant future. By severing the link between the present moment and a patient’s perceived future state, researchers have found a pronounced and significant drop in all forms of anxiety. As well, researchers have found that disengagement with “the future” has allowed many patients complaining of persistent loneliness to live active and productive single lives with no fear or anxiety. (p. 95)"

"Fame without the money to insulate you from it is one of the most wretched human conditions possible. (p. 80)"

"Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media might do us all such tremendous favours when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much as the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Syracuse University commencement address, May 8, 1994 [Source of the book's title]"

"Yesirree, life sure is good. Yesirree, nothing could possibly go wrong with everything being so good. But of course, in books, good is boring. Good is a snoozer. Good makes people close the covers and never reopen them. But you know—you'd think that just once when life finally started going my way, that cosmic writer out there would allow me and all of my co-characters to simply enjoy things for just a little while. I mean, what kind of a prick would end a book just when everything's going so well?"

"Hang on a second—you already have my old laptop. Why do you want my new drives so badly?" "Because my contract says I have to write a book, and it's much easier just to steal your life than to make something up."

"Life is dull, but it could be worse and it could be better. We accept that a corporation determines our life’s routines. It’s the trade-off so that we don’t have to be chronically unemployed creative types, and we know it. When we were younger, we’d at least make a show of not being fooled and leave copies of Adbusters on our desktops. After a few years it just doesn’t matter. You trawl for jokes or amusingly diversionary .wav files. You download music. A new project comes along, then endures a slow-motion smothering at the hands of meetings. All ideas feel stillborn. The air smells like five hundred sheets of paper. And then it’s another day."

"I was wondering what electrons are actually doing when they sit in your hard drive in an old laptop at the back of your closet. I mean, how does an electron sit still — is it like a cartoon M&M learning back in a folding beach chair? Is it like an angry little steel ball bearing hovering there, just waiting to go nuts on protons? What’s the mechanism that starts and stops the electron? Who’s its dungeon master?"

"Let's go out and buy a statistically average meal from a large multinational restaurant chain. That usually fixes about seventy-five percent of life's problems."

"Hip flasks are the juice machines of the alcohol world — everyone has one and it never gets used."

"“What do lesbians have against capitalized letters?” “Capitalization implies a hierarchy, that some letters are more special than others.”"

"You're never too old to dance, Dad...and you're never too old to dream." "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard you say. Were you saying that with irony or for real?"

"It turns out that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony — which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value. I can’t imagine anything worse than that. Okay, maybe I can, but imagine reading the morning newspaper and believing it all to be true on some level."

"You know what? When you read a book, you’re totally lost in your own private world, and society says that’s a good and wonderful thing. But if you play a game by yourself, it’s this weird, fucked-up, socially damaging activity. In my neighbourhood, all the teenage boys are dying because they’re driving their cars using videogame physics instead of real-world physics. They turn too quickly and change lanes too quickly. They don’t understand traction or centripetal force. And they’re dropping like flies. Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What — suddenly you’ve magically turned into Noam Chomsky? Don’t discuss Sony like it’s a great big benevolent cartoon character who lives next door to Astro Boy. Like any company, Sony is comprised of individuals who are fearful for their jobs on a daily basis, and who make lame decisions based pretty much on fear and conforming to social norms — but then, that’s every corporation on earth, so don’t single out one specific corporation as lovable and cute. They’re all evil and greedy. They’re all sort of in the moral middle ground, where good and bad cancel each other out, so there’s nothing really there — which, in it’s own way, far darker than any paranoid or patriarchal theory of Sony. Here’s a much simpler example of geeks and neural processing malfunctions: Has anybody experienced a geek environment in which said geeks wear perfume or deodorant? Chances are no. While advanced microautistics are more commonly men than women, both share a marked dislike of scent."

"The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we’ve started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless."

"“I was in a testy mood. I’d been inside my head all day — some days that just happens. You get lost doing just one task, and suddenly you look up and it’s dark out, but you still don’t want to leave your headspace, and the she comes up behind you with a 150 KHz marine emergency blow horn and lets off one big parp that has you shitting out your eyes, ears, and nostrils, and when you turn around, you discover that your evil co-workers were videoing the entire prank, and you get furious and you scream for everybody to fuck off and die. “Aw shucks, it was only a joke,” but the fact remains that because of that one loud parp you’ll never be able to parse C++ code again because you fried those dendrites that dictate logic patterns, and in a flash you see yourself as a future object of pity, forced to work at a TacoTime outlet, feeding disrespectful larvae of the middle classes while taking soiled orange PVC trash bags out to the back alley, where you see a grease storage drum, and wistfully remember that earlier, more charmed portion of your life when you once knew the chemicals and procedures necessary to convert restaurant grease into clean-burning planet-friendly ethanol, and that was just one of the many feats your brain was capable of, back before the parping, back before people whispered when they saw you walking their way, hoping they wouldn’t have to make small talk with you, back before they dumbed themselves down to the verbal level of Pebbles Flintstone to make you understand them."

"“I wish my parents took good care of their grow-op.”"

"“A girl can’t control who will and who won’t fall in love with her, Ethan. And sometimes, when a nuisance person falls in love with you, it can be awfully… awkward.”"

"Older staffers don’t even bother coming in on weekends. Where is the sleep-crazed, Pepsi-fuelled one-point-oh tech environment that can only be created by having no green vegetables, no sex and no life? Cowboy said, “I miss the greed of the 1990s bubble.” John Doe said, “I miss the possibility of unearned wealth.” Bree said, “I miss the possibility of doing something Apple, something one-point-oh.” Evil Mark said, “I miss people having Hot Wheels tracks set up in their cubicles.” Gord-O walked into the pod. “You can’t miss the nineties, because you weren’t there. They were great. Too bad you screwed-up twits missed out on the party.”"

"“Why are we drinking Zima? It’s beyond irony. It’s not funny or anything. It’s just gross. Why not just serve us jugs of Hitler’s piss instead?” “Drinking Zima is something Douglas Coupland would make a character do.” “To what end?” “It’d be a device that would allow him to locate the characters in time and a specific sort of culture.”"

"“You have to admit, half the people who work here are mildly autistic; poor social skills, the ability to obsess on anything numerical or repetitive, the odd outfits, the paranoia and the sense of continually being judged and measured.”"

"Here’s my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can’t fake are erections, competence and creativity. That’s why meetings become toxic — they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be. And the more effort they put into concealing their inabilities, the more toxic the meeting becomes."

"It can be really fun to go down with the ship."

"Chances are you feel superior to almost everyone you work with — however, they probably feel the same way about you."

"Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?"

"Only damaged people want good things to happen to them through visualization. They want something for nothing."

"If you can control your emotions, chances are you don’t have too many."

"Ethan is annoyed with all of these dumb campaigns that indoctrinate millions of people into thinking they’re tough-guy free spirits when, in fact, there’s probably much to be said for following and, in any event, the food chain isn’t structured to encompass millions of non-followers."

"Comics day came and went. Another shoes day came and went. And another comics day followed that — the typical production and consumption cycles that help us survice our dismal, meaningless little lives."

"As he ages and sees more of the world, he’s realizing that bad news is a part of life, and that when you have to give it, just say it and get it over with."

"“You feel chilled because you have no character. You’re a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you’re perpetually on the brink of being obsolete — whether it’s labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness. And it’s all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle. You’re glamorized drosophila flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim. If it isn’t a budget-driven eighteen-month game production schedule, it’s a five-year hardware obsolescence schedule. Every five years you have to throw away everything you know and learn a whole new set of hardware and software specs, relegating what was once critical to our lives to the cosmic slag heap.”"

"I mean five thousand years ago people emerge out of nowhere -- sproing!—with brains and everything and begin wrecking the planet. You'd think we'd give the issue a little more thought than we do."

"You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about yourself."

"You worry that if you lower your guard, even for one second, your whole world will disintegrate into chaos."

"Your refusal to acknowledge the dark side of humanity makes you prey to that dark side."

"You wilfully ignore the small, gentle observations in life which you know are the most important."

"You still don't know what you do well."

"You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog."

"You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing."

"You don't believe magic is possible in lives lived within traditional boundaries."

"Your inability to achieve solitude makes you settle for substandard relationships."

"I tell you what: I give you all of my strength - I seal it inside a little green envelope and mail it to you with hope and peace and much much love. Take all you need and take it quickly."

"I'm beginning to feel like a microwaved egg that will explode if anybody so much as breathes onto the surface."

"I have this feeling watching Jasmine - that as you grow older, it becomes harder to feel 100 percent happy; you learn all the things that can go wrong; you become superstitious about tempting fate, about bringing disaster upon your life by accidentally feeling too good one day."

"When you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you. It's called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don't. Here is a list of the symptoms, and don't worry - loneliness is the most universal sensation on the planet. Just remember one fact - loneliness will pass. You will survive and you will be a better human for it."

"We call Jasmine's room 'The Harem,' a sexy place, about which Dan never complained, even though his own possessions, his laptop PC and briefcase, for example, looked crazy in the environment, invasive and overcomplex, like Stealth bombers in SmurfWorld."

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