A Quote by Douglas Coupland
A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal.
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A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age - regardless of how they look on the outside - pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.
Everybody past a certain age, regardless of how they look on the outside, pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.
I did 'Viva Las Vegas' with Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret. By standing in for Ann-Margret for a week, I learned the feeling of being a star in a musical number.
I left Paramount at the ripe young age of sixty. A generation ago, that would have been retirement age. But my generation has more energy, more drive, and a greater life expectancy than any group of retirees before us. We are going to be here for two decades or more past 'retirement' age and we want to do something relevant in the so-called third act of our lives.
The view of earth is spectacular from space. Most people imagine that when astronauts look out the window of the shuttle they see the whole earth like that big blue marble that was made famous by the flights that went to the moon. But the shuttle is much, much closer than those astronauts were. So we don't see the whole planet, the whole ball at once, we just see parts of it.
It's pretty amazing to me that we have had a space shuttle program that's lasted for 30 years - for one space shuttle. That's quite an achievement.
Space is for everybody. It's not just for a few people in science or math, or for a select group of astronauts. That's our new frontier out there, and it's everybody's business to know about space.
A few years ago, everybody was saying we must have more leisure, everyone's working too much. Now everybody's got more leisure time they're complaining they're unemployed. People don't seem to make up their minds what they want.
Years ago - I used to be an actor - I was in a production of Vaclav Havel's 'Temptation,' and when we started rehearsals, he was in prison. When we closed the show, he was running for president. And it felt incredibly timely and important and also this lucky thing.
Vaclav Havel didn't want to ride around in big black cars. And he had his own car with a little red heart on it. And he loved to go out and talk to the people.
I had an epiphany a few years ago where I was out at a celebrity party and it suddenly dawned on me that I had yet to meet a celebrity who is as smart and interesting as any of my friends.
Why did I want to be an astronaut? That's not an easy question to answer because I know a lot of kids want to be astronauts when they grow up but it stuck with me and I think just maybe growing up in Houston and always having the astronauts and the Johnson Space Center in my backyard, I was always aware of the space program.
Manned spaceflight has lost its glamour - understandably so, because it hardly seems inspiring, 40 years after Apollo, for astronauts merely to circle the Earth in the space shuttle and the International Space Station.
I think that everyone at any age should ask themselves, 'where do I want to be today, where do I want to be tomorrow, and where do I want to be in a hundred years?' We all have clear answers to those questions. We only have so much time. It's a real shame if we don't spend our lives trying to do that.
Everywhere I go I meet girls and boys who want to be astronauts and explore space, or they love the ocean and want to be oceanographers, or they love animals and want to be zoologists, or they love designing things and want to be engineers. I want to see those same stars in their eyes in 10 years and know they are on their way!
Not until the space shuttle started flying did NASA concede that some astronauts didn't have to be fast-jet pilots. And at that point, sure enough, women started becoming astronauts.
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