Douglas Coupland Quotes

Unhappy endings are just as important as happy endings. They’re an efficient way of transmitting vital Darwinian information. Your brain needs them to make maps of the world, maps that let you know what sorts of people and situations to avoid.

When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.

It was pivotal in making you but you don't remember it. Or do you? Do we understand the events that make us who we are? Do we understand the factors that make us do the things we do?

We're all born lost, aren't we? We're all born separated from God - over and over life makes sure to inform us of this - and yet we're all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must.

A ring is a halo on your finger.

In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as though we are spellcast. We speak in sentences that end before finishing. We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone. We bump into others and feel bashful at recognizing souls so similar to ourselves.

People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity.

The more you want something to happen, the harder it becomes.

Hasn't it been a long time since you had a flying dream?

And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.

Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective.

Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.

Flying dreams mean that you're doing the right thing with your life.

You guys just wait and see. We'll stand taller than these mountains. We'll bare open our hearts for the world to grab. We'll see lights where there was dimness. We'll testify together to what we have seen and felt. Life will go on--all of us--crawling; stumbling, falling perhaps. But we will be the strong ones. Our hearts will shine brightly.

Question: If there were two of you which one would win?

Keep your treasure to yourself.

Besides, animals don’t even have time. Only humans have time. It’s what makes us different.

I think God is how you deal with everything that's out of your own control.

So much information lacks a good way to store it, especially when it's all digital; sometimes it requires old technology to go back and retrieve it.

And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.

Everyone has a special place they store their tension (I'm on shiatsu duty), the same way everyone misspells the same words over and over. Karla stores her tension in her rhomboid muscles, and I remove it. This is making me feel good. That I can do this.

Discussions of generations only go downhill. There's no point in having them.

Sometimes I think the people to feel the saddest for are people who are unable to connect with the profound—people such as my boring brother-in-law, a hearty type so concerned with normality and fitting in that he eliminates any possibility of uniqueness for himself and his own personality. I wonder if some day, when he is older, he will wake up and the deeper part of him will realize that he has never allowed himself to truly exist, and he will cry with regret and shame and grief.

We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age.

Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be SMcQ23667bot@hotmail.com.

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.

There is no shame in impulse.

I've given up wanting to make a killing or be a bigshot. I just want to find happiness and maybe open up a little roadside cafe in Idaho.

I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.

Being asked what animal you'd like to be is a trick question; you're already an animal.

My mood has changed now. And the sun has gone behind the clouds. I'm in this mood I feel occasionally... this mood where there's a very good friend nearby who I should be phoning. If only I could reach that friend and talk, then everything would be just fine. The dilemma is, of course, I just don't know who that friend is. But in my heart I know my mood is merely me feeling disconnected from my true inner self.

All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.

Vaccinated Time Travel: To fantasize about traveling backward in time, but only with proper vaccinations.

Jason said, "Yes. Gerard T. Giraffe." What does the 'T' stand for?" 'The.

I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.

It's like male geeks don't know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it's a user interface problem. Not their fault. They'll just wait for the next version to come out- something more "user friendly.

Las Vegas is a SimCity game gone horribly wrong.

The harder you try to become the opposite of your parents, the more quickly you become them.

Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don't work that way. French? Dieu! Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge.

Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives?

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.

If your life had lyrics, would they be any good?

I think, there are people for whom freedom is a bigger, more important thing than stability.

But I guess the nice thing about driving a car is that the physical act of driving itself occupies a good chunk of brain cells that otherwise would be giving you trouble overloading your thinking. New scenery continually erases what came before; memory is lost, shuffled, relabeled and forgotten. Gum is chewed; buttons are pushed; windows are lowered and opened. A fast moving car is the only place where you're legally allowed to not deal with your problems. It's enforced meditation and this is good.

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.

Once you establish a look, and once everybody recognizes that look as your look, you never have to think about fashion again.

You really have to wonder why we even bother to get up in the morning. I mean, really: Why work? Simply to buy more stuff?

I cry because the future has once again found its sparkle and has grown a million times larger. And I cry because I am ashamed of how badly I have treated the people I love–of how badly I behaved during my own personal Dark Ages–back before I had a future and someone who cared for me from above. It is like today the sky opened up and only now am I allowed to enter