Top 100 Coupland Quotes
#1. I don't know what Douglas Coupland thinks about his writing. I've read maybe one page of one of his books and didn't think I was similar to him. But it seems like people just compare you to anyone, pretty much.
Tao Lin
#2. Anything's better than Gen X which is what we got. Thanks Douglas Coupland. We sound like a team of mutant vigalantees with frosted hair and chain wallets. Actually that's not completely horrible.
Patton Oswalt
#3. Face it: You're always just a breath away from a job in telemarketing.
Douglas Coupland
#4. You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.
Douglas Coupland
#5. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.
Douglas Coupland
#6. I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.
Douglas Coupland
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. If you have a great idea, you should be able to communicate it as well. It's like the sound of one hand clapping. You have a great idea but aren't able to express it - well, how great was the idea?
Douglas Coupland
#11. Chronocanine Envy:
Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, Life must be lived forward.
Douglas Coupland
#12. the BIG issue nowadays is that on TV and in magazines, the images we see, while they appear surreal, "really aren't surrealistic, because they're just random, and there's no subconsciousness underneath to generate the images.
Douglas Coupland
#13. Mediums change you by their very existence. They do this on fundamental levels because they force you to favour certain parts of your brain over others.
Douglas Coupland
#14. The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.
Douglas Coupland
#15. Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.
Douglas Coupland
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. The bland politician's smile of someone who knows that the bodies in the car trunk are, indeed, dead.
Douglas Coupland
#19. When you get an e-mail and reply to the sender, you simply obliterate everything they sent you and then, in small square brackets, write: [deletia] It stands for everything that's been lost.
Douglas Coupland
#20. Everybody has basically the same family, it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.
Douglas Coupland
#21. Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.
Douglas Coupland
#22. What if God exists except it turns out he doesn't really like people very much?
Douglas Coupland
#23. Once you've used your brain flat-out, you can't go into the SLOW mode. You can't drive an Infinite J-3B and then get downgraded to an Daewoo. Brains don't workd that way.
Douglas Coupland
#24. Blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos.
Douglas Coupland
#25. Dag insists that all dogs secretly speak the English language and subscribe to the morals and beliefs of the Unitarian church ...
Douglas Coupland
#26. I sandpapered the roof of my mouth with 3 bowls of Cap'n Crunch - had raw gobbets of mouth-beef dangling onto my tongue all day
Douglas Coupland
#27. Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.
Douglas Coupland
#29. 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
#30. I like doing radio because it's so intimate. The moment people hear your voice, you're inside there heads, not only that, you're in there laying eggs.
Douglas Coupland
#31. 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
#32. I like being surrounded by good ideas. Every single time you walk past something you like, you get a blast of happy chemicals to the brain, and I like that.
Douglas Coupland
#33. I think, there are people for whom freedom is a bigger, more important thing than stability.
Douglas Coupland
#34. Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler.
Douglas Coupland
#35. I've had maybe 20 jobs, big and small, and I've never hated any of them. At the same time, the moment the learning curve flattened, I was out of there.
Douglas Coupland
#36. You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn't care. I guess that's what's scariest: not caring about the loss.
Douglas Coupland
#37. I wondered what it was to pray, because it was something I have never learned to do, and all I remember is falling.
Douglas Coupland
#38. If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you? It'll still be happening to an unchanged person.
Douglas Coupland
#39. I was sick of wanting money. I was sick of being without a goal.
Douglas Coupland
#40. If God drives a car, He'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, with oxblood leather upholstery and an opera window.
Douglas Coupland
#41. Once you establish a look, and once everybody recognizes that look as your look, you never have to think about fashion again.
Douglas Coupland
#42. Some day you cross this thin line and you really realize that we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.
Douglas Coupland
#43. Well, it's amazing what you can find in this world if you're willing to sleep with people.
Douglas Coupland
#44. Most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and once these calories are gone, they're gone for the day - if not the week - and can't be regenerated simply by having an Orange Julius at the Food Fair.
Douglas Coupland
#45. Make your goals big and broad enough so that they never become answered prayers and boomerang to curse you.
Douglas Coupland
#46. Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.
Douglas Coupland
#47. Thinking you're immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal.
Douglas Coupland
#48. You can get a subjective and highly factual dossier on most anyone in the public realm almost instantly. It's why publishers don't worry about author photos any more; people just Google a person and get on with things.
Douglas Coupland
#49. Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.
Douglas Coupland
#50. I have always liked the idea of Superman because I have always liked the idea that there is one person in the world who doesn't do bad things. And that there is one person in the world who is able to fly.
Douglas Coupland
#51. Our achievements may make us interesting, Tyler, but our darkness makes us lovable.
Douglas Coupland
#52. My life is neither a disaster nor supernatural, yet it is an unlikely event.
Douglas Coupland
#53. Lonely people want to be dead, yet we're still not quite ready to go - we don't want to miss the action; we want to see who wins next year's Academy Awards.
Douglas Coupland
#54. We're rapidly approaching a world comprised entirely of jail and shopping.
Douglas Coupland
#55. I miss the reference section at the library. I used to go there twice a week on missions. Now everywhere's a research library and I can't get an elitist kick from it any more.
Douglas Coupland
#56. Jason said, "Yes. Gerard T. Giraffe."
What does the 'T' stand for?"
'The.
Douglas Coupland
#57. If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.
Douglas Coupland
#58. 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 Coupland
#59. The future and eternity are two entirely different things.
Douglas Coupland
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. When you think about Twitter and you think what a dumb stupid throwaway technology, and then you have the Iranian elections and it actually saves the day - you can't prejudge technologies now because they have effects you may not have intended.
Douglas Coupland
#63. 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
#64. I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C's and D's. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room.
Douglas Coupland
#66. Here's what I think: the five most
unattractive traits in people are cheapness, clinginess, neediness, unwillingness to change and
jealousy. Jealousy is the worst, and by far the hardest to conceal.
Douglas Coupland
#67. Forget about being world famous, it's hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.
Douglas Coupland
#69. Later, I would learn that coincidences are the most planned things in the world. Later, I would learn that every single moment is a coincidence.
Douglas Coupland
#70. Sometimes you accidentally input an extra digit into the year: i.e, 19993 and you add 18,000 years on to *now*, and you realize that the year 19993 will one day exist and that time is a scary thing, indeed.
Douglas Coupland
#73. I was so beautiful when I was young. And I took so few photos because I felt so skinny and ugly. I wish I'd just taken a few more shots.
Douglas Coupland
#75. Aliens didn't come down to Earth and give us technology. We invented it ourselves. Therefore it can never be alienating; it can only be an expression of our humanity.
Douglas Coupland
#76. Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.
Douglas Coupland
#77. Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right.
Douglas Coupland
#78. It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.
Douglas Coupland
#79. And I wondered then, how do we ever know what beauty lies inside of people, and the strange ways this world works to lure that beauty outward?
Douglas Coupland
#80. 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
#81. Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.
Douglas Coupland
#82. A good piece of technology dreams of the day when it will be replaced by a newer piece of technology. This is one definition of progress.
Douglas Coupland
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. The Internet has destroyed irony in the world, or at least wounded it considerably. What are we to do about an invention whose end result is that starving people in China are looking up things on marthastewart?
Douglas Coupland
#86. 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
#87. We instinctively wave to people on trains because trains are a metaphor for being alive: countless souls, trapped together, hurtling across the landscape, with a destination somewhere in the unseeable distance.
Nobody ever waves at buses.
Douglas Coupland
#88. With 'Worst. Person. Ever.' I knew where it started and where it had to end, but I threw Raymond as many curveballs as I could along the way. He's like the coyote in the 'Road Runner' cartoons.
Douglas Coupland
#90. All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.
Douglas Coupland
#91. I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and rename three o'clock 'Pepsi.'
Douglas Coupland
#92. My question about luging is, How do you get into the luge community to begin with? Is it one day like, 'Mom, Dad, I really want to luge.' And your parents are like: 'O.K., I'll quit my job. We'll move to an Alpine community.'
Douglas Coupland
#93. How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we knit together this place we call the world? Without stories our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It's a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.
Douglas Coupland
#94. I would like to fall in love again but my only hope is that love doesn't happen to me so often after this. I don't want to get so used to falling in love that i get curious to experience something more extreme - whatever that may be.
Douglas Coupland
#95. We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.
Douglas Coupland
#97. One of the biggest indicators for success in life is having a few crazy relatives. So long as you get only some of the crazy genes, you don't end up crazy; you merely end up different. And it's that difference that gives you an edge, that makes you successfull.
Douglas Coupland
#98. 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
#99. As a form of escapism, yearning for the 20th century is understandable, but in practice it would be horrible - sort of like going on a holiday promising yourself you could go without the Internet, only to crumble and walk in a daze to the local Internet cafe to gorge on connectivity.
Douglas Coupland
#100. It had been drilled into us that to feel fear is to not fully trust God. Whoever made that up has never been beneath a cafeteria table with a tiny thread of someone else's blood trickling onto their leg.
Douglas Coupland
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