Douglas Coupland: Trending quotes (page 6)

““Why are we drinking Zima? It’s beyond irony. It’s not funny or anything. It’s just gross. Why not just serve us jugs of Hitler’s piss instead?”
“Drinking Zima is something Douglas Coupland would make a character do.”
“To what end?”
“It’d be a device that would allow him to locate the characters in time and a specific sort of culture.””

“You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog.”

“I wonder that all things seem to be from hell these days: dates, jobs, parties, weather …. Could the situation be that we no long 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.”

“Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a series of events — a story — and when we can’t figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow.”

“You still don't know what you do well.”

“Fame without the money to insulate you from it is one of the most wretched human conditions possible.”

“To be merely good enough is to never succeed.”

“Decade Blending: In clothing: the indiscriminate combination of two or more items from various decades to create a personal mood: Sheila = Mary Quant earrings (1960s) + cork wedgie platform shoes (1970s) + black leather jacket (1950s and 1980s).”

“You have to admit, half the people who work here are mildly autistic; poor social skills, the ability to obsess on anything numerical or repetitive, the odd outfits, the paranoia and the sense of continually being judged and measured.”

“What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.”

“We had all awakened X number of years past our youth feeling sleazy and harsh. Choices still existed, but they were no longer infinite. Fun had become a scrim, concealing the hysteria that lay behind it.”

“Vaccinated Time Travel: To fantasize about traveling backward in time, but only with proper vaccinations.”

“I'm trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition.”

“You don't believe magic is possible in lives lived within traditional boundaries.”

“I was Cheryl Anway- that has to count for something.”

“Emotional Ketchup Burst: The bottling up of opinions and emotions inside onself so that they explosively burst forth all at once, shocking and confusing employers and friends -- most of whom thought things were fine.”

“…when you're in love, all of your doors are open, and all of their doors are open. And you roller-skate down your halls together.”

“SOLON CR is indicated for the short-term treatment of psychological unease grounded in obsession with thinking about the near and distant future. By severing the link between the present moment and a patient’s perceived future state, researchers have found a pronounced and significant drop in all forms of anxiety. As well, researchers have found that disengagement with “the future” has allowed many patients complaining of persistent loneliness to live active and productive single lives with no fear or anxiety.”

“If you’re an incredibly famous rich person who does more in one day than I do in a month, does your perception of time’s passing go slower or faster than it does for me?”