Douglas Coupland Quotes

225 Sourced Quotes

Finally, my life was a story. My days would no longer feel like a video game that resets to zero every time I wake up, and then begs for coins.

Douglas Coupland
All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.

Douglas Coupland
Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now.

Douglas Coupland
Brazilification: The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.

Douglas Coupland
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
I think we're simply going to run out of Nature before we have a chance to destroy it.

Douglas Coupland
I told Ethan that I speak in an unrestricted manner to animals — things like, aren't you just the cutest little kitty... that kind of thing, which I wouldn't dream of doing to humans. Then I realized I wish I could.

Douglas Coupland
You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn't care. I guess that's what's scariest: not caring about the loss.

Douglas Coupland
'Is the hotel Marge? It has to be Marge. I want atmosphere.' Marge is Anna-Louise's word describing sad, 1950s-ish diner-type places where the waitresses are named Marge.

Douglas Coupland
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
I've never met anyone who has entered the technological realm and not come out of it happier, enhanced and more fulfilled.

Douglas Coupland
"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
People like that woman make it clear just how asinine it is to believe that human beings have some kind of in-built universal sense of goodness. These days I think that everybody's just one spit away from being a mall bomber.

Douglas Coupland
Everybody has a 'gripping stranger' in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it's the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library—a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying 'Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,' you'd follow them.

Douglas Coupland
Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.

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

Douglas Coupland
I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.

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

Douglas Coupland
We have to count. I want to be part of history. I want a Wikipedia page. I want Google hits. I don't want to be just a living organism that comes and goes and leaves no trace on this planet.

Douglas Coupland
There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now.

Douglas Coupland
People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity.

Douglas Coupland
"Ethan, there has to be more to my life than this."
"Why can't you just be happy as a shallow cartoon glyph of a human like everybody else here?"

Douglas Coupland
The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we've started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.

Douglas Coupland
Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounded like a quiet tragedy.

Douglas Coupland
Truth be told, John said, the one thing in this world I want more than anything else is a great big crowbar, to jimmy myself open and take whatever creature that's sitting inside and shake it clean like a rug and then rinse it in a cold, clear lake like up in Oregon, and then I want to put it under the sun to let it heal and dry and grow and sit and come to consciousness again with a clear and quiet mind.

Douglas Coupland
I'd take a helicopter up and throw microwave ovens down on the Taco Bell.

Douglas Coupland
Meeting Anna-Louise was like finding a stranger's shopping list on the mall flooor and realising there are other, more interesting diets than your own. It was the first time I ever felt incomplete.

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

Douglas Coupland
Sometimes you can't realize you're in a bad mood until another person enters your orbit.

Douglas Coupland
You've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup.

Douglas Coupland