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Douglas Coupland Quotes | Quotes said by Douglas Coupland

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #1

    ...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #2

    «…you’re too old not to have had, how shall I say, certain experiences. You’ve had bad internet dates. You’ve had people be creeps to you. You’ve seen what you’ve seen; you’ve felt what you’ve felt. Ideology is for people who don’t trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world»

    «I feel like I am going mad»

    «Madness is actually quite rare in individuals. It’s groups of people who go mad. Countries, cults ... religions»

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #3

    A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #4

    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 Quote #5

    Aliens didn't come down to Earth and give us technology. We invented it ourselves. Therefore it can never be alienating; it can only be an expression of our humanity.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #6

    All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #7

    And his computer's spell-check always forces him to capitalize the word Internet. Come on; World War Two earned it's capitalization. The Internet just sucks human beings away from reality.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #8

    And in his heart, I think, he's now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I've said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #9

    And once again, work is providing us with a comforting sense of normalcy-living and working inside of coding's predictably segmented time/space. Simply grinding away at something makes life feel stable, even though the external particulars of life (like our pay checks, our office, and so forth) are, at best, random.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #10

    And the reason Luke is thinking about time and free will is because he believes that money is the closest human beings have ever come to crystallizing time and free will into a compact physical form. Cash. Cash is a time crystal. Cash allows you to multiply your will, and it allows you to speed up time. Cash is what defines us as a species. Nothing else in the universe has money.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #11

    Anti-sabbatical: A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #12

    Anyway, it's a good thing we're human. We design business spreadsheets, paint programs, and word processing equipment. So that tells you where we're at as a species. What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #13

    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 Quote #14

    At least there's nothing scary about him and hopefully he doesn't see anything scary in me. We go way back, to summer camp. We KNOW each other. People I don't know just make me want to say YIKES! I'll take history over mystery any day of the week.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #15

    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?
    -Richard

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #16

    Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #17

    believe that 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. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #18

    Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #19

    Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be SMcQ23667bot@hotmail.com.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #20

    By the age of twenty, you know you're not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you're not going to be a dentist or any kind of professional. And by thirty, darkness starts moving in- you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy and successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life, and you become resigned to your fate...

    ...I mean, why do people live so long? What could be the difference between death at fifty-five and death at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five? Those extra years... what benefit could they possibly have? Why do we go on living even though nothing new happens, nothing new is learned, and nothing new is transmitted? At fifty-five, your story's pretty much over.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #21

    Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #22

    Christmas makes everything twice as sad.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #23

    Chronocanine Envy:
    Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, Life must be lived forward.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #24

    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 Quote #25

    Dimanchophobia:
    Fear of Sundays, not in a religious sense but rather, a condition that reflects fear of unstructured time. Also known as acalendrical anxiety. Not to be confused with didominicaphobia, or kyriakephobia, fear of the Lord's Day.

    Dimanchophobia is a mental condition created by modernism and industrialism. Dimanchophobes particularly dislike the period between Christmas and New Year's, when days of the week lose their significance and time blurs into a perpetual Sunday. Another way of expressing dimanchophobia might be life in a world without calendars. A popular expression of this condition can be found in the pop song Every Day is Like Sunday, by Morrissey, in which he describes walking on a beach after a nuclear way, when every day of the week now feels like Sunday.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #26

    Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #27

    Eroticize intelligence.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #28

    Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you.

  • Douglas Coupland Quote #29

    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 Quote #30

    Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.

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