Douglas Coupland - Lives Quotes

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Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.

Douglas Coupland
You don't believe magic is possible in lives lived within traditional boundaries.

Douglas Coupland
We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there's a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thogught we'd have a bowel movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better.

Douglas Coupland
What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.

Douglas Coupland
Historical Overdosing: to live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

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
SOLON CR is indicated for the short-term treatment of psychological unease grounded in obsession with thinking about the near and distant future. By severing the link between the present moment and a patient's perceived future state, researchers have found a pronounced and significant drop in all forms of anxiety. As well, researchers have found that disengagement with the future has allowed many patients complaining of persistent loneliness to live active and productive single lives with no fear or anxiety.

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

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

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