Douglas Coupland Quotes

“She went crazy with a calm face,
justifiably so.”

“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.”

“… 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.”

“What is the one thing more than any other thing that makes one person different from any other person?”

“I used to always think I had to have a reason to record my observations of the day, or even my emotions, but now I think simply being alive is more than enough reason.”

“Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.”

“I didn't realize then that so much of being adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience”

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

“Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.”

“I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I've realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.”

“Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you.”

“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 SMcQ23667bot@hotmail. com.”

“People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity. (from inside the cover)”

“Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounded like a quiet tragedy.”

“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.”

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

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

“I hereby declare you Generation A, as much as the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago”

“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.”

“Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes.”

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

“All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.”

“Adventure without risk is Disneyland.”

“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?”

“… blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos.”

“…I realized that once people are broken in certain ways they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one.”

“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.”

“So where do you start when you want to start your life again?”

“I think of how the person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.”

“there are three things we cry for in life: things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.”

“Dreams don't come true. Dreams die. Dreams get compromised. Dreams end up dealing meth in a booth at the back of the Olive Garden. Dreams choke to death on bay leaves. Dreams get spleen cancer.”

“Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers.”

“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.”

“Jason once told me that eye contact is the most intimacy two people can have -- forget sex -- because the optic nerve is technically an extension of the brain, and when two people look into each other's eyes, it's brain-to-brain.”

“Question: If there were two of you which one would win?”

“As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.”

“Sometimes you can't realize you're in a bad mood until another person enters your orbit.”

“If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you? It'll still be happening to an unchanged person.”

“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.”

“Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now.”

“Only the disenfranchised can party with abandon.”

“As I'm never going to be old, I'm glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness.”

“A few years ago it dawned on me that 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.”

“Do you ever just want to take your car out onto the highway and gun the engine as fast
as you can and then close your eyes and see what happens?”

“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.”

“One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.”

“There is no shame in impulse.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic.”

“Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make.”

“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.”

“Happy. And then I got afraid that it would vanish as quickly as it came. That it was accidental-- that I didn't deserve it. It's like this very, very nice car crash that never ends.”

“We're all born lost, aren't we? We're all born separated from God - over and over life makes sure to inform us of this - and yet we're all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must.”

“I curled myself into a ball and cried quietly, doing that thing that only young people can do, namely, feeling sorry for myself. Once you're past thirty you lose that ability; instead of feeling sorry for yourself you turn bitter.”

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

“What is human behavior, except trying to prove that we're not animals?”

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

“It's like male geeks don't know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it's a user interface problem. Not their fault. They'll just wait for the next version to come out- something more "user friendly.”

“Our achievements may make us interesting, Tyler, but our darkness makes us lovable.”

“I have always liked the idea of Superman because I have always liked the idea that there is one person in the world who doesn’t do bad things. And that there is one person in the world who is able to fly.”

“… 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.”

“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.”

“I don't understand beauty.”

“Poverty Jet Set: A group of people given to chronic travelling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permenant residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone call relationships with people named Serge or Ilyana. Tend to discuss frequent flyer programs at parties.”

“You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.”