Top 100 Douglas Coupland Quotes
#1. Face it: You're always just a breath away from a job in telemarketing.
Douglas Coupland
#2. You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.
Douglas Coupland
#3. Fashion only seems to make sense if it's rooted in some dimension of history or if it feels like a continuation of an idea.
Douglas Coupland
#4. Tofu hot dogs are actually scarier than real hot dogs. It's like wanting the worst possible meat product without even the thrill of it actually being meat.
Douglas Coupland
#5. SAFETY NET-ISM: The belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life's hurts. Usually parents.
Douglas Coupland
#6. Dag insists that all dogs secretly speak the English language and subscribe to the morals and beliefs of the Unitarian church ...
Douglas Coupland
#7. MID-TWENTIES BREAKDOWN: A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.
Douglas Coupland
#8. TV is all about hair. And then skin. And then clothing. And then it's about your voice. And finally the report, what you're actually saying. And 99 times out of 100, it never gets past the hair.
Douglas Coupland
#9. Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler.
Douglas Coupland
#10. Once you establish a look, and once everybody recognizes that look as your look, you never have to think about fashion again.
Douglas Coupland
#11. Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.
Douglas Coupland
#12. The future and eternity are two entirely different things.
Douglas Coupland
#13. For whatever reason, I tend to get reporters who are maybe in the middle of intense therapy, and they turn what's supposed to be a professional interview into therapy for themselves.
Douglas Coupland
#14. We threw chew toys to Misty, Mom's golden retriever that she bought two years ago secondhand. Misty was supposed to be a seeing-eye dog, but she failed her exam because she's too affectionate. It's a flaw we don't mind.
Douglas Coupland
#15. The neighborhood I grew up in had this fence that surrounds the watershed. And if you go on the other side of that fence, there's nothing until the North Pole and down to Siberia. It's the absolute cutoff point between man and nature.
Douglas Coupland
#16. I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I've realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.
Douglas Coupland
#17. I like having a beard. My beard changes my face shape and allows me to see in it family members who I love and can't see otherwise.
Douglas Coupland
#18. It's sort of a law of the art world: The stuff that grows in importance is only the stuff you bought because it wowed you.
Douglas Coupland
#19. I find people who prejudge reality TV to be annoying. Art comes from anywhere. Culture can ooze out of any crack. Prejudging is the death of creativity.
Douglas Coupland
#20. Salad bars are like a restaurant's lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.
Douglas Coupland
#21. A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.
Douglas Coupland
#22. You're right, a spleen is a strange thing-we technically don't need one, but maybe spleens are kept in our bodies in case we mutate or evolve, and if we grow wings or tentacles we need to have the spleen in place in order for them to work.
Douglas Coupland
#23. So where do you start when you want to start your life again?
Douglas Coupland
#24. I'd change you bandages for you, but you don't have any and that's a big issue here.
Douglas Coupland
#25. It's around midnight. After I left Dad, my choice was to either become very drunk or write this. I
chose to write this. It felt kind of now-or-never for me.
Douglas Coupland
#26. Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now.
Douglas Coupland
#28. I'm pro-forwards. Do I want the Seventies to come back? No. The haircuts were terrible. Everyone stank. The food was awful.
Douglas Coupland
#29. Brain research tells us 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.
Douglas Coupland
#30. I get verklempt if I see a vintage TI-30 or TI-54 calculator. But I don't think I'd want to use one.
Douglas Coupland
#31. Microserfs (1995) p28 'He's thinking of quitting [Microsoft] to be a pixelation broker, going around to museums to digitize their paintings
Douglas Coupland
#34. In my ears i hear a noise, and this noise is the sound of the color of the sun.
Douglas Coupland
#35. I've always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writing, present tense, so write in the present as it is.
Douglas Coupland
#36. You don't believe magic is possible in lives lived within traditional boundaries.
Douglas Coupland
#37. 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.
Douglas Coupland
#39. Nearly all of the Nobodies he saw were men. Women, he thought, had so many more ways to connect themselves to the world
children, families, friends.
Douglas Coupland
#40. I don't remember where I was before I was born, why should I be worried about where I go after I die?
Douglas Coupland
#41. Given the infinite number of coincidences that could happen, very few ever actually do. The universe exists in a coincidence-hating state of anti-fluke.
Douglas Coupland
#42. All systems have failed me. In five
minutes I'll be fine again for a while, but right now the inside of my head feels like Niagara
Falls without the noise, just this mist and churning and no real sense of where earth ends and
heaven begins.
Douglas Coupland
#43. I felt like I was walking on an airport's rubber conveyor belt.
Douglas Coupland
#44. I'm not a hoarder, I'm a collector: if you have something you like, every time you see it, you have a little happy hit.
Douglas Coupland
#46. At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?
-Richard
Douglas Coupland
#47. Only pain makes it grow stronger. One sorrow makes it kind. Contentment makes it wither, and joy seems to build walls around it. The heart is perverse, and it is cruel. I hate the heart and seems to hate me.
Douglas Coupland
#48. Most time capsules, when they're unearthed, are really awful. There's nothing good in them.
Douglas Coupland
#49. It's what makes us different from every other creature in the world - we have time. And we have choices
Douglas Coupland
#50. North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989.
Douglas Coupland
#51. You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about yourself.
Douglas Coupland
#52. Negative? Moi? I think realistic might be a better word. You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don't have maybe just the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere has gone very very cuckoo?
Douglas Coupland
#53. Happy. And then I got afraid that it would vanish as quickly as it came. That it was accidental
that I didn't deserve it. It's like this very, very nice car crash that never ends.
Douglas Coupland
#55. Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives?
Douglas Coupland
#56. Kids today do nothing. They're so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain.
Douglas Coupland
#57. I worship teachers. They can't be paid enough. It depresses me that society sees them as somehow expendable.
Douglas Coupland
#58. And for a while they were happy in their own manner; they had the animal confidence money affords.
Douglas Coupland
#59. When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.
Douglas Coupland
#60. I go to the gym three days a week. You have to or else - I don't want to be the guy that dies shoveling snow.
Douglas Coupland
#61. Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.
Douglas Coupland
#62. I'm an adult. Discipline me and I'll bury you alive. - Roger
Douglas Coupland
#64. In Canada, we're happy to provide a safe haven for next-door neighbors in the middle of a marital dispute. And if anyone trips while crossing the border, we're happy to set their broken bones for free.
Douglas Coupland
#65. I believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup.
Douglas Coupland
#66. If cats were double the size they are now, they'd probably be illegal.
Douglas Coupland
#67. Is that all time is - our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass?
Douglas Coupland
#68. Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
Douglas Coupland
#69. I don't know if it's a very smart idea to admire the living.
Douglas Coupland
#70. But in that one little window of time, many lasting
decisions were made. First, any love for my father that might have remained either in my
mother's heart or my own - vaporized. Second, we knew for sure that Dad was unfixably nuts.
Douglas Coupland
#71. Collecting and hoarding seem to be about the loss of others, while philanthropy and de-accessioning are more about the impending loss of self. (Whoever dies with the most toys actually loses.)
Douglas Coupland
#72. Chronotropic Drugs:
Drugs engineered to affect one's sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect.
Douglas Coupland
#73. [ ... ] and after those big strokes, what's to tell? We run out of things that make us individual very quickly; all of us have far more in common than we do not have in common.
Douglas Coupland
#74. Could the situation be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised Heaven in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can't help but suffer in comparison.
Douglas Coupland
#75. In my mind, I've always checked out in 2037; that's always been my expiration date. I'll be 75.
Douglas Coupland
#76. Rick, I'm holding a do-I-give-a-shit-ometer in my hand, and the needle's not moving. Shut up.
Douglas Coupland
#77. 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 Coupland
#78. In the future, IKEA will become an ever more spiritual sanctuary. In the future, your dream life will increasingly look like Google street view. Everyone will be feeling the same way as you, and there's some comfort to be found there.
Douglas Coupland
#79. Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style- everyone's too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the '90s.
Douglas Coupland
#80. I think we're simply going to run out of Nature before we have a chance to destroy it.
Douglas Coupland
#81. There are three things we cry for in life: things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.
Douglas Coupland
#82. It's fun to sentimentalize the 20th-century lifestyle and the 20th-century brain, but it helps nobody, it makes you look ancient, there's no going back, and you'd be miserable if you did.
Douglas Coupland
#83. And when you meet someone and fall in love, and they fall in love with you, you ask them "Will you take my heart
stains and all?" and they say "I will," and they ask you the same question and you say, "I will," too.
Douglas Coupland
#84. We can no longer create the feeling of an era ... of time being particular to one spot in time.
Douglas Coupland
#85. I kind of wonder if creativity is all morphing into one big thing that's not even art, but something universal and bigger.
Douglas Coupland
#86. I think of how the person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.
Douglas Coupland
#87. There's nothing at the center of what we do ... No center. It doesn't exist. All of us-look at our lives: We have an acceptable level of affluence. We have entertainment. We have a relative freedom from fear. But there's nothing else.
Douglas Coupland
#89. 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.)
Douglas Coupland
#90. I don't think human beings were meant to know so much about the world. All this time and all this
exposure to every conceivable aspect of life - wisdom so rarely enters the picture. We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then
we become bitter and isolated as we age.
Douglas Coupland
#91. We were never supposed to live until 40. We were built to self-destruct at 30, whether from cancer or mental illness. We're all going way beyond our expiration date.
Douglas Coupland
#92. The sixties are like a theme park to them. They wear the costume, buy their tickets, and they have the experience.
Douglas Coupland
#93. I don't understand the human heart. Only pain makes it grow stronger. Only sorrow makes it kind. Contentment makes it wither, and joy seems to build walls around it.
Douglas Coupland
#94. Hi! I'm Ethan, I shop at Ikea. I bought a $300 dining suite and it took me three days to assemble!
Douglas Coupland
#95. Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.
Douglas Coupland
#96. Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.
Douglas Coupland
#97. I like the present. I'm always interested in new ideas, and what's happening. I'm not nostalgic.
Douglas Coupland
#98. Venice Beach: proof of the biological impossibility of imagining a person being simultaneously good-looking and poor.
Douglas Coupland
#99. I guess the thing about exposing your heart is that people may not even notice it. Like a flop movie. Or they'll borrow your heart and they'll forget to return it to you.
Douglas Coupland
#100. Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity.
Douglas Coupland
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