Douglas Coupland - Time 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
If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.

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

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

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
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
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
Vaccinated Time Travel: To fantasize about traveling backward in time, but only with proper vaccinations.

Douglas Coupland
I cry because the future has once again found its sparkle and has grown a million times larger. And I cry because I am ashamed of how badly I have treated the people I love–of how badly I behaved during my own personal Dark Ages–back before I had a future and someone who cared for me from above. It is like today the sky opened up and only now am I allowed to enter

Douglas Coupland
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
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
TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.

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
Is that all time is - our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass?

Douglas Coupland
There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.

Douglas Coupland
Chronotropic Drugs:Drugs engineered to affect one's sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect.

Douglas Coupland
Historical Underdosing: To living a period of time when nothing seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

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
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
Historical Slumming: The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural village — locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back — so as to experience relief when one returns back to the present.

Douglas Coupland