Coupland Douglas Quotes & Sayings

I think social and moral disengagement is repugnant. — Douglas Coupland

Nobody likes being told who or what they are. — Douglas Coupland

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

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

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

But if you accept dreams, you also have to accept nightmares, and I know nightmares are bad things. And if dreams are so special, why is it that no person or company has ever tried to make a drug that leads to better dreaming? Sleeping pills, yes, but dreaming pills? Have scientists even asked that question? — Douglas Coupland

I'm always looking for things that are so incredibly present that they become invisible. — 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

It's just amazing how hard it is for people to change, even when amazing things happen. It almost reinforces who you are instead of making you change. — 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

And when you meet someone and fall in love, and they fall in love with you, you ask them "Will you take my heart
stains and all?" and they say "I will," and they ask you the same question and you say, "I will," too. — Douglas Coupland

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

I can't switch time zones any more. London is one of my favourite places, but I'm always so zonked that I can't appreciate it. It's like a six-inch sheet of glass between me and Charing Cross Road. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

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

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. — Douglas Coupland

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

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

I love working out how things are made, which is why I have so many models of towers. — Douglas Coupland

You know how sometimes after an afternoon nap you wake up with the shakes or anxiety? That's what happened to me. I couldn't remember who I was or where I was or what time of year it was or anything. All I knew was that I was. I felt so wide open, so vulnerable, like a great big field that's just been harvested. — Douglas Coupland

By the age of twenty, you know you're not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you're not going to be a dentist or any kind of professional. And by thirty, darkness starts moving in- you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy and successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life, and you become resigned to your fate ...
... I mean, why do people live so long? What could be the difference between death at fifty-five and death at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five? Those extra years ... what benefit could they possibly have? Why do we go on living even though nothing new happens, nothing new is learned, and nothing new is transmitted? At fifty-five, your story's pretty much over. — Douglas Coupland

To bring order into this jangled sphere man must find its centre Marshall McLuhan — Douglas Coupland

What is human behavior, except trying to prove that we're not animals? — Douglas Coupland

I had been feeling permanently on the cusp of a flu, feeling at that point where I just wanted to borrow somebody else's coat- borrow somebody else's life- their aura. I seemed to have lost the ability to create any more aura on my own. — Douglas Coupland

The neighborhood I grew up in had this fence that surrounds the watershed. And if you go on the other side of that fence, there's nothing until the North Pole and down to Siberia. It's the absolute cutoff point between man and nature. — Douglas Coupland

The urge to reincarnate while still alive is near universal. — Douglas Coupland

I like the present. I'm always interested in new ideas, and what's happening. I'm not nostalgic. — Douglas Coupland

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

Do you think we enjoy hearing about your brand-new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we're pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You'd last about ten minutes if you were my age these days. — Douglas Coupland

I began doing writing projects and art and design projects to explore a new way of seeing Canada. Roots is one more way of continuing this exploration. I want to present a wide-open Canadian sense of color, adventure, communication and openness that defines our country. — Douglas Coupland

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

My father has never once asked me a question, any question. There's a freedom that came from that. It allowed me to create my own way of thinking. — Douglas Coupland

I'm a pretty good drawer. I have trouble painting because you literally have to wait for the paint to dry. I'm disciplined, but I'm not patient. — Douglas Coupland

Las Vegas is a SimCity game gone horribly wrong. — Douglas Coupland

Everybody has a 'gripping stranger' in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it's the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library - a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying 'Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,' you'd follow them. — 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

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. — Douglas Coupland

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

After my brush with the suicidal impulse, I listen with new ears to others when they
speak on the subject. I think there are people who were born with that little door open, and they
have to go through life knowing that they might jump through it at any moment. — Douglas Coupland

In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where two people can finish each other's sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week. — Douglas Coupland

When you think about Twitter and you think what a dumb stupid throwaway technology, and then you have the Iranian elections and it actually saves the day - you can't prejudge technologies now because they have effects you may not have intended. — Douglas Coupland

Art was always my main focus; I fell into writing by accident in the 1980s, writing magazine articles to pay for my studio. I have to put myself into the position of writing; sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes it works great. — Douglas Coupland

I grew up with three brothers, so nearly everything I had was destroyed or made fun of. — Douglas Coupland

Abe: Wise hermit cast adrift on asteroid for thousands of years; has developed odd code languages for everyday actions; lonely but not bitter; his heart is cryogenically frozen, and he must search the universe pursuing the Thawer. — Douglas Coupland

Mediums change you by their very existence. They do this on fundamental levels because they force you to favour certain parts of your brain over others. — Douglas Coupland

Thinking you're immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal. — Douglas Coupland

To acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition. — Douglas Coupland

Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a sequence of events - a story - and when we can't figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow. — Douglas Coupland

I am going to give you a piece of advice ... advice I wish I'd been told in guidance class back in high school, in between the don't-do-acid and don't-drink-and-drive films. I wish our counselors had told us, 'When you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you. It's called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don't. Here is the list of the symptoms, and don't worry - loneliness is the most universal sensation on the planet. Just remember one fact - loneliness will pass. You will survive and you will be a better human for it. — 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

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. — 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 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

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

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

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

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

NOSTALGIA IS A WEAPON — 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

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

I always thought of words as art supplies. — 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

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

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

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

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

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 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

When you crop the photo, you tell a lie. — Douglas Coupland

I know it's not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli? — Douglas Coupland

But then a bumblebee bumbled above us and it stole our attention the way flying things can. — Douglas Coupland

I like to go beach-combing, and I like to find interestingly shaped rocks. When I really get into the groove I start finding beautiful rocks everywhere, until I discover that all of the rocks on the beach are beautiful. And so I try to find beauty even in the smallest moments, because beauty is something that can grow if you let it. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

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

We are changed souls; we don't look at things the same way anymore. For there was a time when we expected the worst. But then the worst happened, did it not? And so we will never be surprised again. — Douglas Coupland

I find people who prejudge reality TV to be annoying. Art comes from anywhere. Culture can ooze out of any crack. Prejudging is the death of creativity. — Douglas Coupland

When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you. — Douglas Coupland

With Jason I thought I'd finally played my cards right, and now I'm just one more of those
broken, sad people out there, figuring out a year in advance where they can have Easter and
Christmas dinner without feeling like a burden or duty to others, cursing the quality of modern
movies because it's so hard to fill weeknights with movies when they're all crap, and waiting, just
waiting, for those three drinks a night to turn into four - and then, well, then I'll be applying my
makeup in the morning, combing my hair, washing my clothes, but it's not really for anyone. I'm
alive, but so what. — Douglas Coupland

I'm agoraphobic. I can't deal with crowds. — Douglas Coupland

Fashion only seems to make sense if it's rooted in some dimension of history or if it feels like a continuation of an idea. — Douglas Coupland

The new world lies before her eyes like an opened chest of treasure, a flock of birds over Africa, a thousand TVs all playing at once. — 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

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

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

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

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

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