Douglas Coupland Quotes

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.

If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.

Wilcox Fate is for losers.

You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about by yourself.

I build my life so that I don't wake up for anything. Ever. If you make me get up early to do something with you, I will hate you and resent you and figure out a way of never having to work with you ever again.

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.

Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

ETHNOMAGNETISM: The tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods: 'You wouldn't understand it there, mother - they hug where I live now.'

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is fantastic. It's volcanic and sexy and utterly unlike anything I've read before. It feels like the future in a dazzling way that has nothing to do with looking backward. It's been a long wait for a new novel from Mark Leyner, but worth it. Ten out of ten from me.

Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler.

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.

I ma trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition.

Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.

And I think back over my own life and I realize that my own nature-the core me-essentially hasn’t changed all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel that same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.

Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you.

The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be healing—a blanket—the comfort of a friend. Without at least some rain in any given day, or at least a cloud or two on the horizon, I feel overwhelmed by the information of sunlight and yearn for the vital, muffling gift of falling water.

The belief that tomorrow is a different place from today is certainly a unique hallmark of our species.

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.

The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder.

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? That's just not enough. Look at us all. What's the common assumption that got us all from there to here? What makes us deserve the ice cream and running shoes and wool Italian suits we have? I mean, I see all of us trying so hard to acquire so much stuff, but I can't help but feeling that we didn't merit it.

Christmas makes everything twice as sad.

If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.

TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.

I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.

Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.

OPTION PARALYSIS: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.

In the old days people had far fewer channels in which to place their imaginative time. There's definitely more competition for time . . . and yet people seem to be reading [books] as much.