Douglas Coupland: Trending quotes (page 7)

“"Just go and feed yourselves on a wide array of products containing high-fructose corn sugar. Zheesh."
"That wasn't funny, Evil Mark. It sounded fake and hollow. You're terrible at being ironic, and you've been rehearsing that line, haven't you?"”

“Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs.”

“If you can control your emotions, chances are you don’t have too many.”

“Only damaged people want good things to happen to them through visualization. They want something for nothing.”

“Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.”

“Don’t you get an empty feeling in your soul when you have a blank to-do list?”

“Chances are you feel superior to almost everyone you work with — however, they probably feel the same way about you.”

“Her friends have become who they've become by default. Their dreams are forgotten, or were never formulated to begin with.”

“People like that woman make it clear just how asinine it is to believe that human beings have some kind of in-built universal sense of goodness. These days I think that everybody's just one spit away from being a mall bomber.”

“Meeting Anna-Louise was like finding a stranger's shopping list on the mall floor and realising there are other, more interesting diets than your own. It was the first time I ever felt incomplete.”

“We call Jasmine's room 'The Harem,' a sexy place, about which Dan never complained, even though his own possessions, his laptop PC and briefcase, for example, looked crazy in the environment, invasive and overcomplex, like Stealth bombers in SmurfWorld.”

“Your inability to achieve solitude makes you settle for substandard relationships.”

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

“We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there's a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thought we'd have a bowel movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better.”

“We have to count. I want to be part of history. I want a Wikipedia page. I want Google hits. I don’t want to be just a living organism that comes and goes and leaves no trace on this planet.”

“There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now.”

“It turns out that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony — which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value. I can’t imagine anything worse than that. Okay, maybe I can, but imagine reading the morning newspaper and believing it all to be true on some level.”

“Boomer Envy: Envy of material wealth and long-range material security accrued by older members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate births.”

“Finally, my life was a story. My days would no longer feel like a video game that resets to zero every time I wake up, and then begs for coins.”