Memorable Book Quotes #2

Numbers 2 and 3, actually, because I cannot bring myself to pick a single quote from this book.

Despite the title, there's absolutely nothing anti-theological about this book. It's rather a very poignant story that anyone who has ever felt lonely or lost will most likely respond to.

Being alone now, all my old fears are erupting – the fears I thought I has buried forever by getting married: fear of loneliness; fear that being in and out of love too many times itself makes you harder to love; fear that I would never experience real love; fear that someone would fall in love with me, get extremely close, learn everything about me and then pull the plug; fear that love is only important up until a certain point after which everything is negotiable.

For so many years I lived a life of solitude and I thought life was fine. But I knew that unless I explored intimacy and shared intimacy with someone else then my life would never progress beyond a certain point. I remember thinking that unless I knew what was going on inside of someone else’s head other than my own I was going to explode.


There was the story of a central California widow who had fought to have her recently dead husband exhumed, pleading her case that before he had died he had swallowed her diamond ring in some sort of spite and that she wanted this jewel returned. But in the end she confessed that she had not slept for many many weeks and that she had been spending her nights lying on his grave, trying to speak to him, and that all she really wanted was just to be able to see his face one more time.

Douglas Coupland, Life After God