Douglas Coupland Quotes (193 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Generation A (2009)
Context: Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media might do us all such tremendous favours when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. 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. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Syracuse University commencement address, May 8 1994 [Source of the book's title]

“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

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Generation X (1991)
Source: Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

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

Douglas Coupland book JPod

Source: JPod (2006)
Context: Here’s my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can’t fake are erections, competence and creativity. That’s why meetings become toxic — they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be. And the more effort they put into concealing their inabilities, the more toxic the meeting becomes.

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

Douglas Coupland

Source: All Families are Psychotic

“Adventure without risk is Disneyland.”

Douglas Coupland

“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?”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

Source: JPod (2006)
Context: You know what? When you read a book, you’re totally lost in your own private world, and society says that’s a good and wonderful thing. But if you play a game by yourself, it’s this weird, fucked-up, socially damaging activity.
In my neighbourhood, all the teenage boys are dying because they’re driving their cars using videogame physics instead of real-world physics. They turn too quickly and change lanes too quickly. They don’t understand traction or centripetal force. And they’re dropping like flies.
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?
Don’t discuss Sony like it’s a great big benevolent cartoon character who lives next door to Astro Boy. Like any company, Sony is comprised of individuals who are fearful for their jobs on a daily basis, and who make lame decisions based pretty much on fear and conforming to social norms — but then, that’s every corporation on earth, so don’t single out one specific corporation as lovable and cute. They’re all evil and greedy. They’re all sort of in the moral middle ground, where good and bad cancel each other out, so there’s nothing really there — which, in it’s own way, far darker than any paranoid or patriarchal theory of Sony.
Here’s a much simpler example of geeks and neural processing malfunctions: Has anybody experienced a geek environment in which said geeks wear perfume or deodorant? Chances are no. While advanced microautistics are more commonly men than women, both share a marked dislike of scent.

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

Douglas Coupland

Source: All Families are Psychotic

“…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.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Source: Life After God (1994)

“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 book Life After God

Source: Life After God

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

Douglas Coupland Hey Nostradamus!

Source: Hey Nostradamus!