Douglas Coupland Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

When you're young, you feel like life hasn't yet begun, like life is scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays - whenever. But suddenly you're old, and the scheduled life never arrived. I find myself asking, 'Well, then, exactly what was it I was doing with all that time I had before I thought my life would begin? — Douglas Coupland

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

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

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

He knew that the fuel his brain craved could only be found in a proper university. — Douglas Coupland

And in his heart, I think, he's now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I've said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world. — Douglas Coupland

I've never gone on Facebook or MySpace. — Douglas Coupland

I don't know if it's a very smart idea to admire the living. — Douglas Coupland

TV didn't kill radio, it just added something new to the mix. — Douglas Coupland

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

I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice. — Douglas Coupland

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.' — Douglas Coupland

I was sick of wanting money. I was sick of being without a goal. — Douglas Coupland

BRAZILIFICATION:The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes. — Douglas Coupland

The whole point of Gen X was, and continues to be, a negation of being forced into Baby Boomerdom against one's will. — Douglas Coupland

I keep vampire hours, going to bed at 2 A.M. and waking up at about 10:30-11 A.M. — Douglas Coupland

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

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

Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without. — Douglas Coupland

Life was charmed but without politics or religion. It was the life of children of the children of the pioneers -life after God- a life of earthly salvation on the edge of heaven. Perhaps this is the finest thing to which we may aspire, the life of peace, the blurring between dream life and real life - and yet I find myself speaking these words with a sense of doubt. I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line. I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God. — Douglas Coupland

Everyone should have a tailor. David Wilkes, the guy who does my stuff, is like, 'Well you're a writer - do you want a special pen compartment or something?' Bespoke: That's the term you want to get out there. — Douglas Coupland

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

Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely. — Douglas Coupland

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

I mean five thousand years ago people emerge out of nowhere -sproing!- with brains and everything and begin wrecking the planet. You'd think we'd give the issue a little more thought than we do. — Douglas Coupland

You know what the best thing is about the end of the day? Tomorrow, it starts all over again. — Douglas Coupland

When you grow up these days, you're told you're going to have four or five different careers during your lifetime. But what they don't tell you is that you're also going to be four or five different people along the way. — Douglas Coupland

Life is maybe like deep-sea fishing. We wake up in the morning, we cast our nets into the water, an, if we are lucky, at day's end we will have netted one
maybe two
small fish. Occasionally we will net a seahorse or sometimes a shark
or a life preserver or an iceberg, or a monster. And in our dreams at night we assess our Catch of the Day
the treasures of this long, slow process of accumulation ... — Douglas Coupland

Some day you cross this thin line and you really realize that we need to protect ourselves from ourselves. — Douglas Coupland

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

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

Data transmission is no longer something scary you don't want in your backyard. Now you want it directly in front of your house. — Douglas Coupland

NOSTALGIA IS A WEAPON — Douglas Coupland

Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin. — Douglas Coupland

And for a while they were happy in their own manner; they had the animal confidence money affords. — Douglas Coupland

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

We then return our gaze to the mirror-boxed future-towns circling us-the hard drives of our culture, where the human tribe is making flesh its deepest needs and fears; teaching machines to think; accelerating the pace of obsolescence; designing new animals to replace the animals we've erased; value adding; reconstructing the future. — Douglas Coupland

I've become a day writer: most people start as night writers, and I used to be, but something happened to my endocrine system. I do miss the 3 A.M. writing jags. — Douglas Coupland

[...] we started talking more about all of the fiftysomethings being dumped out of the economy by downsizing. No one knows what to do with these people, and it's so sad, because being 50 nowadays isn't like being 50 a hundred years ago when you'd probably be dead. — Douglas Coupland

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

My arm draped her shoulder; we both felt safe, as if we were a complete solar system unto ourselves, dangling in the sky, warm heated planets inside a universe of stars.
-Richard — Douglas Coupland

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

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

As suburban children we floated at night in swimming pools the temperature of blood; pools the color of Earth as seen from outer space. We would float and be naked - pretending to be embryos, pretending to be fetuses - all of us silent save for the hum of the pool filter. Our minds would be blank and our eyes closed as we floated in warm waters, the distinction between our bodies and our brains reduced to nothing - bathed in chlorine and lit by pure blue lights installed underneath diving boards. Sometimes we would join hands and form a ring like astronauts in space; sometimes when we felt more isolated in our fetal stupor we would bump into each other in the deep end, like twins with whom we didn't even know we shared a womb. — Douglas Coupland

I don't know how anyone gets anything done in cities. How can you live somewhere like London or New York, when there are 81 things to do every night? Awful. Give me solitude and space any time. — Douglas Coupland

It also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present, future or past, either. — Douglas Coupland

I think half the people who get married now have met online. If I think about all the people in my life who married - they met online, online, online. And it makes sense if you think about it, because you fill out this form of 35 things that really define you and - bam - look, you've got two people who match. It works. — Douglas Coupland

If you look at life as a whole, we have to admit life's good where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there's nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a Bohemia or a creative under-world to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag - or a life of crime, or even religion.And now there's only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people it's the System or what ... death? There's nothing. There's no way out now. — Douglas Coupland

We're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change
and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes. — Douglas Coupland

Most time capsules, when they're unearthed, are really awful. There's nothing good in them. — Douglas Coupland

The past is a finite resource. — Douglas Coupland

Maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't know even half the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning - and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better to not know the lyrics to your life. — Douglas Coupland

Society indeed conspires to keep you ball and chained. — Douglas Coupland

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

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

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

You can only fall in love six times in your life. Choose wisely. — Douglas Coupland

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

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

My Google existence is probably larger than a lot of people's. — Douglas Coupland

Which is that there's too much weight improperly distributed: towers and elevators; steel, stone and cement. So much mass up so high that gravity itself could end up being warped
— Douglas Coupland

The one appalling thing about electric cars is that one plugs them into already overtaxed municipal power grids. Try mentioning this to a politician or manufacturer who wants to ride the green wave and you will quickly find yourself escorted out of the room. Mention this twice and you'll magically find yourself on the No Fly List. Mention this three times and your cold lifeless body will be found in a clump of brambles off the nearest motorway. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

How did society ever function without you, little Sharpies? Your nibs have the precise amount of give to create a line quality with character, yet not so much character as to be smushy. Thank you, little pens. — Douglas Coupland

Death without the possibility of ever changing the world is the same as a life that never was. — Douglas Coupland

Marshall alone his room with a comically tall stack of books, methodically absorbing their contents as though they were drugs ... — Douglas Coupland

The heart of a man is like deep water — Douglas Coupland

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

You can't fake competence, creativity, or sexual arousal. — Douglas Coupland

I wonder that all things seem to be from hell these days: dates, jobs, parties, weather ... Could the situation be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised heaving in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can't hep but suffer in comparison. — Douglas Coupland

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

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

She says to me, but were we ever intimate? How intimate were we really? Sure, there were the ordinary familiarity-type things - our bodies, our bodily discharges and stains and seepages, an encyclopedic knowledge of each other's family grudges, knowledge of each other's early school yard slights, our dietary peccadilloes, our tv remote control channel-changing styles. And yet ...
And yet?
And yet in the end did we ever really give each other completely to the other? Do either of us even know how to really share ourselves? Imagine the house is on fire and I reach to save one thing - what is it? Do you know? Imagine that I am drowning and I reach within myself to save that one memory which is me - what is it? Do you know? What things would either of us reach for? Neither of us know. After all these years we just wouldn't know. — Douglas Coupland

I think there is a Paris inside us all. — Douglas Coupland

I'd change you bandages for you, but you don't have any and that's a big issue here. — Douglas Coupland

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

This past year - if you'd have tried, you'd have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people. || A thousands years ago this wouldn't have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids sand. One hundred years ago - or even fifty years ago - the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. the only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That's why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It's because Earth is now totally ours. — Douglas Coupland

I saw doves and I thought they were rocks, but they were asleep. My breath made them stir, and they rocks took flight, the earth exploding ... and my only thought was that I wanted you to see them, too. — Douglas Coupland

When I look at my daily schedule, I feel like a trout flopping about on a dock, drowning in the air. Some people are ruthless with their schedules. Not me. I wing it. — Douglas Coupland

This was not a good idea coming home for Christmas. I'm too old. Years ago, coming back from schools or trips, I always expected some sort of new perspective or fresh insight about the family on returning. That doesn't happen anymore-the days of revelation about my parents, at least, are over ... its time to move on. I think we'd all appreciate that. — Douglas Coupland

We'll go to a place that's quiet and dry and talk about precious things. — Douglas Coupland

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

No-tech tourism is a form of temporal eco-tourism in which one reads books or watches film and TV precisely because of the absence of 21st-century technologies. — Douglas Coupland

The thing with bookshelves, no matter how many you have, you always fill them. — Douglas Coupland

You know, I really think that when God puts together families, he sticks his finger into the white pages and selects a group of people at random and then says to them all, 'Hey! You're going to spend the next seventy years together, even though you have nothing in common and don't even like each other. And, should you not feel yourself caring about any of this group of strangers, even for a second, you will just feel dreadful — Douglas Coupland

There's a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream. — Douglas Coupland

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure. — Douglas Coupland

Florida isn't so much a place where one goes to reinvent oneself, as it is a place where one goes if one no longer wished to be found. — Douglas Coupland

It's difficult to speak with beautiful people. No matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise, you still want them to like you. — Douglas Coupland

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

Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness. — Douglas Coupland

If somebody wants to run for office, they had better to explain why they want to run for office. Wanting to be a candidate seems, in itself, reason for exclusion. — Douglas Coupland

Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries. — Douglas Coupland

I don't understand beauty. — Douglas Coupland

So where do you start when you want to start your life again? — Douglas Coupland

Please, God, don't let Warren be cheap. I'm too young to discuss coupons. — Douglas Coupland

I miss the silliness of the Nineties. What would society be like if 9/11 never happened? If that silliness was extended forever? — Douglas Coupland