Douglas Coupland - Life Quotes

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Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

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

Douglas Coupland
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.

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

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

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
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
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
Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity. That's why meetings become toxic — they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be. And the more effort they put into concealing their inabilities, the more toxic the meeting becomes.

Douglas Coupland
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.

Douglas Coupland
Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives? How hard can it be to change gears and say, "You know what? Instead of inventing and telling stories, I'm going to make my life a more interesting story."

Douglas Coupland
Strange how when you're young you have no memories...Then one day you wake up and BOOM, memories overpower all else in your life, forever making the present moment seem sad and unable to compete with a glorious past that now has a life of its own.

Douglas Coupland
If you're not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world - if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order - then you're wasting your day.

Douglas Coupland
When you see such photos, you can't help but wonder at just how sweet and sad and innocent all moments of life are rendered by the tripping of a camera's shutter, for at that point the future is still unknown and has yet to hurt us, and also for that brief moment, our poses are accepted as honest.

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
Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.

Douglas Coupland
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.

Douglas Coupland
What is prayer but a wish for the events in your life to string together to form a story — something that makes some sense of events you know have meaning.

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
You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about yourself.

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
You wilfully ignore the small, gentle observations in life which you know are the most important.

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

Douglas Coupland
Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don't know why, and if we do find out why, it's decades later and knowing why doesn't matter any more.

Douglas Coupland
The hardest things in the world are being unique and having your life be a story. In the old days, it was much easier, but our modern fame-driven culture, with its real-time 24-7 marinade of electronic information, demands a lot from modern citizens, and poses great obstacles to narrative.

Douglas Coupland
... 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.

Douglas Coupland
Let's go out and buy a statistically average meal from a large multinational restaurant chain. That usually fixes about seventy-five percent of life's problems.

Douglas Coupland
Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.

Douglas Coupland