Douglas Coupland Quotes

225 Sourced Quotes

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
Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a series of events — a story — and when we can't figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow.

Douglas Coupland
Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures... And I think back over my life and I realize that my own nature -the core me- essentially hasn't changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.

Douglas Coupland
Our achievements may make us interesting, Tyler, but our darkness makes us lovable.

Douglas Coupland
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.

Douglas Coupland
We are changed souls; we don't look at things the same way anymore. For there was a time when we expected the worst. But then the worst happened, did it not? And so we will never be surprised again.

Douglas Coupland
Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me.

Douglas Coupland
We call Jasmine's room 'The Harem,' a sexy place, about which Dan never complained, even though his own possessions, his laptop PC and briefcase, for example, looked crazy in the environment, invasive and overcomplex, like Stealth bombers in SmurfWorld.

Douglas Coupland
You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-today comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.

Douglas Coupland
Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words.

Douglas Coupland
Negative? Moi? I think realistic might be a better word. You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don't have maybe just the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere has gone very very cuckoo?

Douglas Coupland
The New World isn't new anymore. The New World – the Americas – it's over. People don't have dominion over Nature. It's gone beyond that. Human beings and the world are now the same thing.

Douglas Coupland
I tell you what : I give you all of my strength - I seal it inside a little green envelope and mail it to you with hope and peace and much much love. Take all you need and take it quickly.

Douglas Coupland
At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?

Douglas Coupland
Salad bars are like a restaurant's lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.

Douglas Coupland
STRANGELOVE REPRODUCTION: Having children to make up for the fact that one no longer believes in the future.

Douglas Coupland
There's nothing cute or funny or lovable about being cheap. It's a total turn-off.

Douglas Coupland
Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas Coupland