Douglas Coupland Quotes

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“There was a fifteen-second patch of silence, then Craig said, 'Isn't it weird that Hotmail accounts still exist?' 'It really is,' said Bev.”

“Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.”

“Being alive is just a brief technicality.”

“It can be really fun to go down with the ship.”

“Your refusal to acknowledge the dark side of humanity makes you prey to that dark side.”

“Historical Overdosing: to live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.”

“Comics day came and went. Another shoes day came and went. And another comics day followed that — the typical production and consumption cycles that help us survice our dismal, meaningless little lives.”

“The two of you start talking about your feelings and your feelings float outside of you like vapors, and they mix together like a fog. Before you realize it, the two of you have become the same mist and you realize you can never return to being just a lone cloud again, because the isolation would be intolerable.”

“What's the point of being efficient if you're only leading an efficiently blank life?”

“I mean five thousand years ago people emerge out of nowhere -- sproing!-- with brains and everything and begin wrecking the planet. You'd think we'd give the issue a little more thought than we do.”

“You worry that if you lower your guard, even for one second, your whole world will disintegrate into chaos.”

““I have this theory about smart people. If you’re smart, you’re either the only person in your family who’s smart, or everybody in the family is smart. No in-between.”
I considered this. “I think I come from the everybody’s smart category. But they don’t apply their smarts to… larger picture pursuits. That includes me.””

“"You're never too old to dance, Dad… and you're never too old to dream."
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard you say. Were you saying that with irony or for real?"”

“Older staffers don’t even bother coming in on weekends. Where is the sleep-crazed, Pepsi-fuelled one-point-oh tech environment that can only be created by having no green vegetables, no sex and no life?
Cowboy said, “I miss the greed of the 1990s bubble.”
John Doe said, “I miss the possibility of unearned wealth.”
Bree said, “I miss the possibility of doing something Apple, something one-point-oh.”
Evil Mark said, “I miss people having Hot Wheels tracks set up in their cubicles.”
Gord-O walked into the pod. “You can’t miss the nineties, because you weren’t there. They were great. Too bad you screwed-up twits missed out on the party.””

“All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.”

“I have this feeling watching Jasmine - that as you grow older, it becomes harder to feel 100 percent happy; you learn all the things that can go wrong; you become superstitious about tempting fate, about bringing disaster upon your life by accidentally feeling too good one day.”

“Unlike Rachel, Player One has a complete overview both of the world and of time. Player One’s life is more like a painting than it is a story. Player One can see everything with a glance and can change tenses at will. Player One has ultimate freedom, the ultimate software on the ultimate hardware. That realm is also the one place where Player One feels, for lack of a better word, normal.”

“I'm beginning to feel like a microwaved egg that will explode if anybody so much as breathes onto the surface.”

“I wish my parents took good care of their grow-op.”

“Hip flasks are the juice machines of the alcohol world — everyone has one and it never gets used.”

“You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.”

“When you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you. It's called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don't. Here is a list of the symptoms, and don't worry - loneliness is the most universal sensation on the planet. Just remember one fact - loneliness will pass. You will survive and you will be a better human for it.”

“Truly modern citizens are both charismatic and can only respond to other people with charisma. To survive, people need to become self-branding charisma robots. Yet, ironically, society mocks and punishes people who aspire to that state.”

“If you're not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world - if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order - then you're wasting your day.”

“"Hang on a second—you already have my old laptop. Why do you want my new drives so badly?"
"Because my contract says I have to write a book, and it's much easier just to steal your life than to make something up."”

“A girl can’t control who will and who won’t fall in love with her, Ethan. And sometimes, when a nuisance person falls in love with you, it can be awfully… awkward.”

“At twenty you know you're not going to be a rock star… by twenty-five you know you're not going to be a dentist or a professional… by thirty, a darkness starts moving in - you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful… by thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing the rest of your life; you become resigned to your fate.”

“Technology does not always equal progress.”

“The hardest things in the world are being unique and having your life be a story. In the old days, it was much easier, but our modern fame-driven culture, with its real-time 24-7 marinade of electronic information, demands a lot from modern citizens, and poses great obstacles to narrative.”

““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?”

“Consensus Terrorism: The process that decides in-office attitudes and behavior.”