Douglas Coupland Quotes

225 Sourced Quotes

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
Life is dull, but it could be worse and it could be better. We accept that a corporation determines our life's routines. It's the trade-off so that we don't have to be chronically unemployed creative types, and we know it. When we were younger, we'd at least make a show of not being fooled and leave copies of Adbusters on our desktops. After a few years it just doesn't matter. You trawl for jokes or amusingly diversionary. wav files. You download music. A new project comes along, then endures a slow-motion smothering at the hands of meetings. All ideas feel stillborn. The air smells like five hundred sheets of paper.
And then it's another day.

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

Douglas Coupland
If you want to get close to somebody, you have to tell him or her something intimate about yourself. They'll tell you something intimate in return, and if you keep this going, maybe you'll end up in love.

Douglas Coupland
Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive.

Douglas Coupland
A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal.

Douglas Coupland
Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs.

Douglas Coupland
Your inability to achieve solitude makes you settle for substandard relationships.

Douglas Coupland
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
I used to always think I had to have a reason to record my observations of the day, or even my emotions, but now I think simply being alive is more than enough reason.

Douglas Coupland
Being alive is just a brief technicality.

Douglas Coupland
I was Cheryl Anway- that has to count for something.

Douglas Coupland
Time, Baby - so much, so much time left until the end of my life - sometimes I go crazy at how slowly time passes yet how quickly my body ages. But I shouldn't allow myself to think like this. I have to remind myself that time only frightens me when I think of having to spend it alone. Sometimes I scare myself with how many of my thoughts revolve around making me feel better about sleeping alone in a room.

Douglas Coupland
Dreams don't come true. Dreams die. Dreams get compromised. Dreams end up dealing meth in a booth at the back of the Olive Garden. Dreams choke to death on bay leaves. Dreams get spleen cancer.

Douglas Coupland
My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.

Douglas Coupland
The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I'm kidding. But killing helps.

Douglas Coupland
Preemptive boringness. Being one-dimensional is the most satisfying method of coping with out-of-control people - with any situation that's out of control … Don't let people know the ideas you love, the games you've played, the places you've visited in your mind. Keep your treasure to yourself.

Douglas Coupland
We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age.

Douglas Coupland
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
I thought that intimacy with another soul was the closest I could ever come to leaving my body.

Douglas Coupland
Yesirree, life sure is good.
Yesirree, nothing could possibly go wrong with everything being so good.
But of course, in books, good is boring.
Good is a snoozer.
Good makes people close the covers and never reopen them.
But you know—you'd think that just once when life finally started going my way, that cosmic writer out there would allow me and all of my co-characters to simply enjoy things for just a little while. I mean, what kind of a prick would end a book just when everything's going so well?

Douglas Coupland
We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.

Douglas Coupland
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
Chances are you feel superior to almost everyone you work with — however, they probably feel the same way about you.

Douglas Coupland
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
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
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
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