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Douglas Coupland Quotes
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Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist and artist. His fiction is complemented by recognized works in design and visual art arising from his early formal training. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized terms such as McJob and Generation X. He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. He is a columnist for Financial Times. He is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux journal, Dis, and Vice. His art exhibits include Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything which was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and the Villa Stuck.Coupland is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a member of the Order of British Columbia. He published his thirteenth novel Worst. Person. Ever. in 2012. He also released an updated version of City of Glass and a biography of Marshall McLuhan for Penguin Canada in their Extraordinary Canadians series, called Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan. He is the presenter of the 2010 Massey Lectures, and a companion novel to the lectures, Player One – What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours. Coupland has been longlisted twice for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2006 and 2010, was a finalist for the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in 2009, and was nominated for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 2011 for Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan. Wikipedia  

✵ 30. December 1961  •  Other names - Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland photo
Douglas Coupland: 193 quotes7 likes

Douglas Coupland Quotes

““What do lesbians have against capitalized letters?”
“Capitalization implies a hierarchy, that some letters are more special than others.””

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Generation A

Source: Generation A (2009), p. 222

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Girlfriend in a Coma

Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

“Being alive is just a brief technicality.”

Douglas Coupland book Generation A

Source: Generation A (2009), p. 167

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

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

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

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland

Definitions
Variant: 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.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland Microserfs

Microserfs (1995)

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

Douglas Coupland book Girlfriend in a Coma

Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Life After God (1994)

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

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

““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.””

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“"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?"”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“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.””

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

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

Douglas Coupland

Generation X (1991)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Player One

Player One (2010)

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

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

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

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

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

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland

Generation X (1991)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Generation A

Generation A (2009)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Girlfriend in a Coma

Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

“"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."”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Girlfriend in a Coma

Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

“Technology does not always equal progress.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Life After God (1994)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Generation A

Generation A (2009)

““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.””

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

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

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland

Generation X (1991)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Player One

Player One (2010)

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

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

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

Douglas Coupland book Generation A

Source: Generation A (2009), p. 80

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

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“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).”

Douglas Coupland

Definitions

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

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

Douglas Coupland Hey Nostradamus!

Hey Nostradamus! (2003)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Girlfriend in a Coma

Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

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

Douglas Coupland

Definitions

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

Douglas Coupland Microserfs

Microserfs (1995)

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

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

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

Douglas Coupland Hey Nostradamus!

Hey Nostradamus! (2003)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland

Definitions

“…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.”

Douglas Coupland Microserfs

Microserfs (1995)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Generation A

Source: Generation A (2009), p. 95

“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?”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)