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]

“TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

Source: JPod (2006)

“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

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Source: Life After God (1994)

“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.

“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.”

Douglas Coupland

“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.”

Douglas Coupland Hey Nostradamus!

Source: Hey Nostradamus!

“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