Douglas Coupland Quotes

Beware of the corporate invasion of private memory.

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

There is no shame in impulse.

The past is a finite resource.

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

At least when you're young you're also stupid.

I'm an adult. Discipline me and I'll bury you alive. - Roger

You can never become rich unless you like rich people.

HISTORICALOVERDOSING:To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen.

MCJOB: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice for people who have never held one.

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.

Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic.

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.

I think writing would have happened to me anyway, somehow. Differently, but it still would have happened.

I think, there are people for whom freedom is a bigger, more important thing than stability.

Why are we even here [on earth], what's our human nature? It's precipitating a real philosophical crisis that I find quite fascinating.

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.

The more you want something to happen, the harder it becomes.

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.

Discussions of generations only go downhill. There's no point in having them.

TV is all about hair. And then skin. And then clothing. And then it's about your voice. And finally the report, what you're actually saying. And 99 times out of 100, it never gets past the hair.

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.

I think individual people are interesting, not really groups of people.

I like having a beard. My beard changes my face shape and allows me to see in it family members who I love and can't see otherwise.

You've seen what you've seen you've felt what you've felt. Ideology is for people who don't trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world.

I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life they merely get used to it.

Sometimes we all forget that the world itself is paradise, and there has been much of late to enourage that amnesia. (Microserfs, p 366)

Chronocanine Envy:Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, "Life must be lived forward.

We can no longer create the feeling of an era...of time being particular to one spot in time.

Humans are part of nature, and nature is one great big wood chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones, and hair.

At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?-Richard

I think that emotions affect you as much as x-rays and vitamins and car crashes.

Wow. Whoops. Sorry. ... I just lost two hours inside a YouTube kitten warp.

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

Hi! I'm Ethan, I shop at Ikea. I bought a $300 dining suite and it took me three days to assemble!

The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I’m kidding. But killing helps.

The sixties are like a theme park to them. They wear the costume, buy their tickets, and they have the experience.

Nostalgia for the 20th century brain helps nobody.

I hate math. It's hard, it's stupid, and it's nature's way of separating spinsters from women who end up breeding.

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.

Everybody past a certain age, regardless of how they look on the outside, pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.

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.

To have a healthy culture, you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don't have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.

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.

Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space.

We were never supposed to live until 40. We were built to self-destruct at 30, whether from cancer or mental illness. We're all going way beyond our expiration date.

I've had maybe 20 jobs, big and small, and I've never hated any of them. At the same time, the moment the learning curve flattened, I was out of there.

I'm pro-forwards. Do I want the Seventies to come back? No. The haircuts were terrible. Everyone stank. The food was awful.

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.