Douglas Coupland citations

Page 3

“It's like male geeks don't know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it's a user interface problem. Not their fault. They'll just wait for the next version to come out- something more "user friendly.”

“Our achievements may make us interesting, Tyler, but our darkness makes us lovable.”

“You've seen what you've seen; you've felt what you've felt. Ideology is for people who don't trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world.”

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

“I have always liked the idea of Superman because I have always liked the idea that there is one person in the world who doesn’t do bad things. And that there is one person in the world who is able to fly.”

“… 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.”

“Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.”

“I don't understand beauty.”

“Poverty Jet Set: A group of people given to chronic travelling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permenant residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone call relationships with people named Serge or Ilyana. Tend to discuss frequent flyer programs at parties.”

“You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.”

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

“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.”