128 Quotes & Sayings By Douglas Coupland

Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy. Douglas Coupland

My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments–we hear a word that sticks in our mind–or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly–we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen–or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station. And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection–certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether; one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real–this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives. Douglas Coupland

When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they’re locked into jobs they hate; that they’re broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they’re fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It’s profoundly depressing. Douglas Coupland

She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living? 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

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

You should be spreading the good word. You should be etching the good word onto the glass scanning beds of library photocopiers. You should be scraping the truth onto old auto parts and throwing them off bridges so that people digging in the mud in a million years will question the world, too. You should be carving eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe soles so that your every trail speaks of thinking and faith and belief. You should be designing molecules that crystallize into poems of devotion. You should be making bar codes that print out truth, not lies. You shouldn't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has the truth stamped on it--a demand for people to reach a finer place! ..Your new life will be tinged with urgency, as though you're digging out the victims of an avalanche. If you're not spending every waking moment of your life living the truth, if you're not plotting every moment to boil the carcass of the old order, then you're wasting your day. Douglas Coupland

Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that He created anorder for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles, we're also asking that He unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracleswould be a cartoon, not a world. Douglas Coupland

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

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

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

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

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

I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints.... I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does. Douglas Coupland

It had been drilled into us that to feel fear is to not fully trust God. Whoever made that up has never been beneath a cafeteria table with a tiny thread of someone else's blood trickling onto their leg. Douglas Coupland

I think if human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. Wouldn't life be more interesting that way? And now that I think about it, why the heck don't they? Who made the rule that everybody has to dress like sheep 364 days of the year? Think of all the people you'd meet if they were in costume every day. People would be so much easier to talk to - like talking to dogs. Douglas Coupland

In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as though we are spellcast. We speak in sentences that end before finishing. We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone. We bump into others and feel bashful at recognizing souls so similar to ourselves. Douglas Coupland

Humans are part of nature, and nature is one great big wood chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones, and hair. Douglas Coupland

You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be. Douglas Coupland

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

This past year - if you'd have tried, you'd have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people. || A thousands years ago this wouldn't have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids sand. One hundred years ago - or even fifty years ago - the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. the only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That's why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It's because Earth is now totally ours. Douglas Coupland

People don't have dominion over Nature. it's gone beyond that. Human beings and the world are now the same thing. The future and whatever happens to you after you die - it's all melted together. Death isn't the escape hatch the way it used to be. Douglas Coupland

Or maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't even know the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning - and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better not to know the lyrics to your life. Douglas Coupland

I'd sooner have died than admit that the most valuable thing I owned was a fairly extensive collection of German industrial music dance mix EP records stored for even further embarrassment under a box of crumbling Christmas tree ornaments in a Portland, Oregon basement. So I told him I owned nothing of any value. Douglas Coupland

Worrying about money is one of the worst worries. It’s like having locked-in syndrome, except you’re still moving around and doing things. Your head burns. If other people are not having money problems, it pisses you off because it reminds you that you’re limited in the ways you can express your agency in the world, and they aren’t. Worrying about money is anger-inducing because it makes you think about time: how many dollars per hour, how much salary per year, how many years until retirement. Worrying about money forces you to do endless math in your head, and most people didn’t like math in high school and they don’t like it now. Douglas Coupland

So I got to thinking that perhaps that’s what money is: a crystallization–or, rather, a homogenization–of time and free will into those things we call dollars and pounds and yen and euros. Money multiplies your time. It also expands your agency and broadens the number of things you can do accordingly. Big-time lottery winners haven’t won ten million dollars–they’ve won ten thousand person-years of time to do pretty much anything they want anywhere on Earth. Windfalls are like the crystal meth version of time and free will. Douglas Coupland

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

You know, I really think that when God puts together families, he sticks his finger into the white pages and selects a group of people at random and then says to them all, 'Hey! You're going to spend the next seventy years together, even though you have nothing in common and don't even like each other. And, should you not feel yourself caring about any of this group of strangers, even for a second, you will just feel dreadful . Douglas Coupland

It is indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels Douglas Coupland

You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn't care. I guess that's what's scariest: not caring about the loss. Douglas Coupland

I think of how people can betray me simply by not caring enough to hide the fact of how little they care. I think of how the person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member. Douglas Coupland

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

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

I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom. Douglas Coupland

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

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

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

Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years. Douglas Coupland

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

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

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

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

I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst?. . If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet -- with just one person inside even -- I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does. Douglas Coupland

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

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

People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that's always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge you're free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else. Douglas Coupland

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

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

Personality is a slot machine, and the cherries, lemons, and bells are your SSRI system, your schizophrenic tendency, your left/right brain lobalization, your anxiety proclivity, your wiring glitches, your place on the autistic and OCD spectrums - and to these we must add the deep-level influences of the machines and systems of intelligence that guided your brain into maturity. Douglas Coupland

«…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

When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun–that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays–whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having–that interlude–the scrambly madness–all that time I had before? Douglas Coupland

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

The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be healing–a blanket–the comfort of a friend. Without at least some rain in any given day, or at least a cloud or two on the horizon, I feel overwhelmed by the information of sunlight and yearn for the vital, muffling gift of falling water. Douglas Coupland

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

Nostalgia for the 20th century brain helps nobody. Douglas Coupland

In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul; polluted waters mean a sickened soul. Water is the basis of our self-identity, and when we dream of canoes and thunderstorms and streams and even snowballs, we're dreaming about our innermost selves. Douglas Coupland

One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild-into its ancestral sea-its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end . Douglas Coupland

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

I hate math. It's hard, it's stupid, and it's nature's way of separating spinsters from women who end up breeding. Douglas Coupland

Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment--that being alive is important, because just when you least expect it, you might receive exactly what you least expect. Douglas Coupland

Jason once told me that eye contact is the most intimacy two people can have -- forget sex -- because the optic nerve is technically an extension of the brain, and when two people look into each other's eyes, it's brain-to-brain. Douglas Coupland

Post-adolescent Expert SyndromeThe tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure warriors who are willing to die with pleasure on the battlefield. Also the reason why religions recruit kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers almost exclusively from the 18-21 range. "Kyle, I never would have guessed that when you were up in your bedroom playing World of Warcraft all through your teens, you were, in fact, becoming an expert on the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Douglas Coupland

Okay, I know--my superpower-- I'd be able to shoot lightening bolts out from my fingertips--great big knowledge network lightening bolts--and when a person was zapped by one of those bolts, they'd fall down on their knees and once on their knees, they'd be under water, in this place I saw once off the east coast of the Bahamas, a place where a billion electric blue fish swam up to me and made me a part of their school--and then they'd be up in the air, up in Manhattan, above the World Trade Center, with a flock of pigeons, flying amid the skyscrapers, and then--then what? And then they'd go blind, and then they'd be taken away--they'd feel homesick--more homesick than they'd felt in their entire life--so homesick they were throwing up--and they'd be abandoned, I don't know..in the middle of a harvested corn field in Missouri. And then they'd be able to see again, and from the edges of the field people would appear--everybody they'd known--and they'd be carrying Black Forest cakes and burning tiki lamps and boom boxes playing the same song, and they sky would turn into a sunset, the way it does in Walt Disney brochure, and the person I zapped would never be alone or isolated again. Douglas Coupland

For many people, myself included, the end of the world is happening all the time! It is a form of criticality that paradoxically gives us hope for change and improvement. Douglas Coupland

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

Everybody past a certain age, regardless of how they look on the outside, pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. Douglas Coupland

Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure. Douglas Coupland

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

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

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

The advent of cellphones may, in the end, be no more relevant than the ability of laptops to change our written documents into ones using cool new fonts. Douglas Coupland

I began doing writing projects and art and design projects to explore a new way of seeing Canada. Roots is one more way of continuing this exploration. I want to present a wide-open Canadian sense of color, adventure, communication and openness that defines our country. Douglas Coupland

I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C's and D's. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room. Douglas Coupland

To have a healthy culture, you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don't have that, your culture becomes a parking lot. Douglas Coupland

I don't know how anyone gets anything done in cities. How can you live somewhere like London or New York, when there are 81 things to do every night? Awful. Give me solitude and space any time. Douglas Coupland

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

I decided at 40 I was wasting entire chunks of my brain and didn't want to blow my one chance on Earth. I'm glad I made that decision. Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space. Sometimes, as with film, you can hybridize, but I think it's basically the space part of my brain wanting equal footing with the time part. Douglas Coupland

Christmas makes everything twice as sad. Douglas Coupland

Forget about being world famous, it's hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence. Douglas Coupland

We were never supposed to live until 40. We were built to self-destruct at 30, whether from cancer or mental illness. We're all going way beyond our expiration date. Douglas Coupland

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations. Douglas Coupland

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own. Douglas Coupland

I've had maybe 20 jobs, big and small, and I've never hated any of them. At the same time, the moment the learning curve flattened, I was out of there. Douglas Coupland

I know it's not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli? Douglas Coupland