Douglas Coupland Quotes

225 Sourced Quotes

Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.

Douglas Coupland
PERSONALITY TITHE: A price paid for becoming a couple; previously amusing human beings become boring: 'Thanks for inviting us, but Noreen and I are going to look at flatware catalogs tonight. Afterward we're going to watch the shopping channel.

Douglas Coupland
In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.

Douglas Coupland
Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don't work that way. French? Dieu! Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge.

Douglas Coupland
Once you establish a look, and once everybody recognizes that look as your look, you never have to think about fashion again.

Douglas Coupland
One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.

Douglas Coupland
Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you.

Douglas Coupland
Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive.

Douglas Coupland
What exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human? There has to be something. How odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people.

Douglas Coupland
Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

Douglas Coupland
Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad lasts for very very long.

Douglas Coupland
Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you.

Douglas Coupland
Chronotropic Drugs:Drugs engineered to affect one's sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect.

Douglas Coupland
Marketing is essentially about feeding the poop back to diners fast enough to make them think they're still getting real food.

Douglas Coupland
ETHNOMAGNETISM: The tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods: 'You wouldn't understand it there, mother-they hug where I live now.'

Douglas Coupland
We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but instead because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.

Douglas Coupland
Only losers make decisions when things are bad. The time to rejig your life is the time when it's seemingly smooth.

Douglas Coupland
When you are young, you always expect that the world is going to end. And then you get older and the world still chugs along and you are forced to re-evaluate your stance on the apocalypse as well as your own relationship to time and death. You realize that the world will indeed continue, with or without you, and the pictures you see in your head. So you try to understand the pictures instead.

Douglas Coupland
When you grow up these days, you're told you're going to have four or five different careers during your lifetime. But what they don't tell you is that you're also going to be four or five different people along the way.

Douglas Coupland
Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler.

Douglas Coupland
Figure out what it is in life you don't do well, and then don't do it.

Douglas Coupland
Time perception is very much about how you sequence your activities, how many activities you layer overtop of others, and the types of gaps, if any, you leave in between activities.

Douglas Coupland
There's a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream.

Douglas Coupland
It's not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments.

Douglas Coupland
Good looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters.

Douglas Coupland
This was not a good idea coming home for Christmas. I'm too old. Years ago, coming back from schools or trips, I always expected some sort of new perspective or fresh insight about the family on returning. That doesn't happen anymore-the days of revelation about my parents, at least, are over... its time to move on. I think we'd all appreciate that.

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

Douglas Coupland
Clique Maintenance: The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: Kids today do nothing. They're so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain.

Douglas Coupland
I have an idea. … If Ethan and Mark are so similar, we might as well arbitrarily assign them distinct personality traits. I know—Mark, from here on, you're to be called 'Evil Mark.'

Douglas Coupland
And then I felt sad because 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. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.

Douglas Coupland