Douglas Coupland Quotes

I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain to be alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything.

She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?

Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?

Sometimes I think God is like weather - you may not like the weather, but it has nothing to do with you. You just happen to be there. Deal with it. Sadness and grief are part of being human and always will be.

Nobody cares about worthiness. People care about what is real inside of you.

When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they’re locked into jobs they hate; that they’re broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they’re fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It’s profoundly depressing.

With the first drink comes the truth, with the second drink comes wishful thinking, and with the third drink come the lies.

I didn't realize then that so much of being adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience

I really do force myself to not be fully engaged with all the technology at once, just because I have an addictive personality and I get too into it.

Do you ever just want to take your car out onto the highway and gun the engine as fast as you can and then close your eyes and see what happens?

My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.

Truth be told, John said, the one thing in this world I want more than anything else is a great big crowbar, to jimmy myself open and take whatever creature that's sitting inside and shake it clean like a rug and then rinse it in a cold, clear lake like up in Oregon, and then I want to put it under the sun to let it heal and dry and grow and sit and come to consciousness again with a clear and quiet mind.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

It's starts out young- you try not be different just to survive- you try to be just like everyone else- anonymity becomes reflexive- and then one day you wake up and you've become all those other people- the others- the something you aren't. And you wonder if you can ever be what it is you really are. Or you wonder if it's too late to find out.

One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.

Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you.

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?

Adventure without risk is Disneyland.

Los Angelenos dress like they've been focus-grouped.

What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation.

Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me.

With Google I'm starting to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. People in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.

Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.

Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity.

Back in the late 1970's, when I was fifteen years old, I spent every penny I then had in the bank to fly across the continent in a 747 jet to Brandon, Manitoba, deep in the Canadian prairies, to witness a total eclipse of the sun.

Once he entered my life, I promptly forgot all my years of putting on a brave face while browsing at bookstores until closing time, and of having one, two, three beers while watching crime shows and CNN. I completely forgot the hateful sensation of loneliness, like thirst and hunger together pressing on my stomach.

I think writing would have happened to me anyway, somehow. Differently, but it still would have happened.

I think we're simply going to run out of Nature before we have a chance to destroy it.

You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.

I tried to think of a witty play on Every picture tells a thousand words, but then the whole word/picture thing collapsed on me.

Imagine you're a forty-year-old, Richard," Hamilton said to me around this time, while working as a salesman at a Radio Shack in Lynn Valley,"and suddenly somebody comes up to you saying, 'Hi, I'd like you to meet Kevin. Kevin is eighteen and will be making all of your career decisions for you.' I'd be flipped out. Wouldn't you? But that's what life is all about - some eighteen-year-old kid making your big decisions for you that stick for a lifetime." He shuddered.

In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul; polluted waters mean a sickened soul. Water is the basis of our self-identity, and when we dream of canoes and thunderstorms and streams and even snowballs, we're dreaming about our innermost selves.

At least when you're young you're also stupid.

Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.

If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?

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.

Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What — suddenly you’ve magically turned into Noam Chomsky?

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.

I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom.

Here are some passing thoughts. Imagine looking up at the moon and seeing it burning. Imagine seeing the grocery store’s checkout girl grow horns. Imagine growing younger instead of older. Imagine feeling more powerful and more capable of falling in love with life every new day instead of being scared and sick and not knowing whether to stay under a sheet or venture forth into the cold.

People will always choose more money over more sex

I think of how people can betray me simply by not caring enough to hide the fact of how little they care.I think of how the person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

Society indeed conspires to keep you ball and chained.

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. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade.

Capitalization implies a hierarchy, that some letters are more special than others.

Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.