Douglas Coupland: Quotes about life

“Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.”

“I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.”

“Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity.”

“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.”

“…I realized that once people are broken in certain ways they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one.”

“I didn't realize then that so much of being adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience”

“So where do you start when you want to start your life again?”

“there are three things we cry for in life: things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.”

“I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I've realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.”

“Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.”

“We're all born lost, aren't we? We're all born separated from God - over and over life makes sure to inform us of this - and yet we're all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must.”

“Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just
something we haul into the grave.”

“… you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.”

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

“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.””

“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.”

“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."”