Douglas Coupland Quotes
Only losers make decisions when things are bad. The time to rejig your life is the time when it's seemingly smooth.
Time perception is very much about how you sequence your activities, how many activities you layer overtop of others, and the types of gaps, if any, you leave in between activities.
So much information lacks a good way to store it, especially when it's all digital; sometimes it requires old technology to go back and retrieve it.
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.
Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be [email protected].
I know it's not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli?
Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you.
The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.
I think that to acknowledge a new generation is to acknowledge some degree of obsolescence in yourself, and that is very hard to do and often comes with undeniable anger.
Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words.
It's weird when people start sentences with 'frankly' - as if their other sentences don't count.
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.
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.
What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.
It was pivotal in making you but you don't remember it. Or do you? Do we understand the events that make us who we are? Do we understand the factors that make us do the things we do?
My writing process is ritualized and monotonous, but there's no other way to get the job done. All other fiction writers I've met say the same thing.
Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave.
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.
The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I'm kidding. But killing helps.
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.
I ma trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition.
Death without the possibility of ever changing the world is the same as a life that never was.
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.
...you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.
The universe hands you opportunities for a while, and if you don't take them, the universe says to itself, 'Oh I see, this person doesn't like opportunities' and stops giving them to you.
We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but instead because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.
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?
Could the situation be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised Heaven in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can't help but suffer in comparison.
