Douglas Coupland Quotes

To have a healthy culture, you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing a...

I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints.......

I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by ...

I think that to acknowledge a new generation is to acknowledge some degree of obsolescence in yourse...

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

I began doing writing projects and art and design projects to explore a new way of seeing Canada. Ro...

For many people, myself included, the end of the world is happening all the time! It is a form of cr...

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know ...

We were never supposed to live until 40. We were built to self-destruct at 30, whether from cancer o...

Flying dreams mean that you're doing the right thing with your life.

It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn't go about their daily routine with the assumpti...

When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms...

Technology favors horrible people.

I think Americans are weirdly puritanistic about psychopharmaceuticals. There are millions of people...

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or...

Aliens didn't come down to Earth and give us technology. We invented it ourselves. Therefore it can ...

Christmas makes everything twice as sad.

Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

I don't know how anyone gets anything done in cities. How can you live somewhere like London or New ...

I decided at 40 I was wasting entire chunks of my brain and didn't want to blow my one chance on Ear...

Dimanchophobia:Fear of Sundays, not in a religious sense but rather, a condition that reflects fear ...

And his computer's spell-check always forces him to capitalize the word "Internet". Come on; World W...

Personality is a slot machine, and the cherries, lemons, and bells are your SSRI system, your schizo...

Hi! I'm Ethan, I shop at Ikea. I bought a $300 dining suite and it took me three days to assemble!

Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless people.

Everybody past a certain age, regardless of how they look on the outside, pretty much constantly dre...

We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be ...

Forget about being world famous, it's hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarke...

Chronocanine Envy:Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only...

Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space.

A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forg...

The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.

My question about luging is, How do you get into the luge community to begin with? Is it one day lik...

«…you’re too old not to have had, how shall I say, certain experiences. You’ve had bad internet date...

Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you.

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

As you grow older, it becomes harder to feel 100 percent happy; you learn all the things that can go...

If cats were double the size they are now, they'd probably be illegal.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sound...

I think that emotions affect you as much as x-rays and vitamins and car crashes.

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

Whatever happened to books? Suddenly everybody's talking about these 100-hour movies called 'Breakin...

If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on H...

Anyway, it's a good thing we're human. We design business spreadsheets, paint programs, and word pro...

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horr...

The advent of cellphones may, in the end, be no more relevant than the ability of laptops to change ...

Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.

When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - ...

Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? Well, that's where all the ...

A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams ...

...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that...

I think if human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not j...

Or maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawl...

I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.

Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space ...

People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity.

Wow. Whoops. Sorry. ... I just lost two hours inside a YouTube kitten warp.

In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravag...

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

The sixties are like a theme park to them. They wear the costume, buy their tickets, and they have t...

In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as though we are spellcast. We speak in se...

At least there's nothing scary about him and hopefully he doesn't see anything scary in me. We go wa...

I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same bo...

And the reason Luke is thinking about time and free will is because he believes that money is the cl...

I think of how people can betray me simply by not caring enough to hide the fact of how little they ...

Post-adolescent Expert SyndromeThe tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especi...

Humans are part of nature, and nature is one great big wood chipper. Sooner or later, everything sho...

You should be spreading the good word. You should be etching the good word onto the glass scanning b...

Chronotropic Drugs:Drugs engineered to affect one's sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have n...

You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: ...

You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, bu...

By the age of twenty, you know you're not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you're n...

Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way h...

Sometimes we all forget that the world itself is paradise, and there has been much of late to enoura...

We can no longer create the feeling of an era...of time being particular to one spot in time.

When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun—that "life" is always scheduled to beg...

Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to ...

My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few li...

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

People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someon...

I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just ...

And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever ...

The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be he...

Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chanc...

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

The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I’m kidding. But killing helps.

You know what the best thing is about the end of the day? Tomorrow, it starts all over again.

I hate math. It's hard, it's stupid, and it's nature's way of separating spinsters from women who en...

Jason once told me that eye contact is the most intimacy two people can have -- forget sex -- becaus...

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

To acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition.

And in his heart, I think, he's now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I've said all along...

It had been drilled into us that to feel fear is to not fully trust God. Whoever made that up has ne...

It is indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels

Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that He created anorder for the worl...

This past year - if you'd have tried, you'd have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to ch...

One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born...

At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do...

People don't have dominion over Nature. it's gone beyond that. Human beings and the world are now th...