Best Douglas Coupland Quotes & Sayings

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. — Douglas Coupland

What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives. — Douglas Coupland

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

After you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of earth? What one moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet. What's your takeaway? Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

Mr. Gunt, Mr. Neal here is a street survivor. We at the airline are honoring the homeless this year, and it was our airline's privilege and delight to offer him the one remaining business-class seat as a token of our faith in the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. With the full authority of the EU air-system code behind me, I order you back to 67E. — Douglas Coupland

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room. — Douglas Coupland

Men won't read any email from a woman that's over 200 words long. — Douglas Coupland

As brothers and sister we knew instinctively that if we were going to stand in darkness, best we stand in a darkness we had made ourselves. — Douglas Coupland

If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil. — Douglas Coupland

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

[ ... ] and it was like the universe had suddenly turned itself off and the world was almost holy, like life was suddenly religious, but good religious, and suddenly everyone became the best version of themselves. — Douglas Coupland

For many people, myself included, the end of the world is happening all the time! It is a form of criticality that paradoxically gives us hope for change and improvement. — Douglas Coupland

Why is it Americans are socially permitted to say 'fricking' when in fact everyone knows the word they're actually saying is 'fucking'?
... here you have some bland ho-bag telly presenter saying 'I'm so fricking mad' about whatever, while you, the home viewer, know she's three millimeters away from saying 'I'm so fucking mad'. But instead of being outraged because she basically said 'fucking' on TV, everyone giggles, like she's being cute.
... it's like ten times worse because the public is thinking 'fucking, fucking, fucking'. They're so full of shame or so socially conditioned that the mental effect of saying the word 'fucking' is technically amplified. By actually saying the word 'fucking' in real life, instead of 'fricking', you're doing American society a favor. — Douglas Coupland

It'd be preposterous for me to propose a universal cure to loneliness but I will say that people who do the things they find interesting, either creatively or vocationally, tend to become unlonely very quickly. — Douglas Coupland

Maybe thinking you're supposed to 'have a life' is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be. How do we know that all of these people with 'no lives' aren't really on the new frontier of human sentience and preceptions? — Douglas Coupland

Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just
something we haul into the grave. — Douglas Coupland

Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive. — Douglas Coupland

Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make. — Douglas Coupland

I grew up in airports and on air bases. I know what flying and airports can be. And most airports make me feel like we're about three per cent better than ants. Especially U.S. airports. They're zoos. All civility is gone. — Douglas Coupland

It hit him that his own form of loneliness was a luxury, one as chosen and as paid for as three weeks in Kenya's velds or a cherry red Ferrari. Real loneliness wasn't something an assistant scoped out and got a good price on. Real loneliness was smothering and it stank of hopelessness. — Douglas Coupland

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

I always thought of words as art supplies. — Douglas Coupland

The best part of my life is gone, and what remains is whizzing past so quickly I feel like I'm Krazy-Glue'ed onto a mechanical bull of a time machine. — Douglas Coupland

Time erases both the best and the worst of us. — Douglas Coupland

The best thing about being young is being stupid. Or rather, the best thing about being young is being too stupid to know how stupid you really are. — Douglas Coupland

Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure. — Douglas Coupland

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

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

And once again, work is providing us with a comforting sense of normalcy-living and working inside of coding's predictably segmented time/space. Simply grinding away at something makes life feel stable, even though the external particulars of life (like our pay checks, our office, and so forth) are, at best, random. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

At least there's nothing scary about him and hopefully he doesn't see anything scary in me. We go way back, to summer camp. We KNOW each other. People I don't know just make me want to say YIKES! I'll take history over mystery any day of the week. — Douglas Coupland

A rich man is always simply a rich man, but a rich woman is only a poor woman who just happens to have money. — Douglas Coupland

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

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. — Douglas Coupland

If he'd learned one thing while he'd been away, it was that loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears out a room. — Douglas Coupland

You can't get mad at weather because weather's not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life. — Douglas Coupland

I don't like telephones: I don't like when they ring. Just because it rings, you have to pick it up. I don't even like opening mail; I'm weird. — Douglas Coupland

NOSTALGIA IS A WEAPON — Douglas Coupland

Clowns drink to blot out the ravages of terrifying children for a living. — Douglas Coupland

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

So I got to thinking that perhaps that's what money is: a crystallization - or, rather, a homogenization - of time and free will into those things we call dollars and pounds and yen and euros. Money multiplies your time. It also expands your agency and broadens the number of things you can do accordingly. Big-time lottery winners haven't won ten million dollars - they've won ten thousand person-years of time to do pretty much anything they want anywhere on Earth. Windfalls are like the crystal meth version of time and free will. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

Gap clothing allows you to look like you're from nowhere and anywhere. — Douglas Coupland

Rick, I'm holding a do-I-give-a-shit-ometer in my hand, and the needle's not moving. Shut up. — Douglas Coupland

Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain. — Douglas Coupland

People don't have dominion over Nature. it's gone beyond that. Human beings and the world are now the same thing. The future and whatever happens to you after you die - it's all melted together. Death isn't the escape hatch the way it used to be. — Douglas Coupland

The advent of cellphones may, in the end, be no more relevant than the ability of laptops to change our written documents into ones using cool new fonts. — Douglas Coupland