Douglas coupland quotes

When you grow up these days, you're told you're going to have four or five different careers during your lifetime. But what they don't tell you is that you're also going to be four or five different people along the way.

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

What if God exists except it turns out he doesn't really like people very much?

I curled myself into a ball and cried quietly, doing that thing that only young people can do, namely, feeling sorry for myself. Once you're past thirty you lose that ability; instead of feeling sorry for yourself you turn bitter.

Venice Beach: proof of the biological impossibility of imagining a person being simultaneously good-looking and poor.

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

What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation.

Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes.

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

Back in the late 1970's, when I was fifteen years old, I spent every penny I then had in the bank to fly across the continent in a 747 jet to Brandon, Manitoba, deep in the Canadian prairies, to witness a total eclipse of the sun.

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.

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

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?

New York is a theme park for people with IQs over 108.

I would like to fall in love again but my only hope is that love doesn't happen to me so often after this. I don't want to get so used to falling in love that i get curious to experience something more extreme - whatever that may be.

If you look at life as a whole, we have to admit life's good where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there's nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a Bohemia or a creative under-world to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag - or a life of crime, or even religion.And now there's only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people it's the System or what... death? There's nothing. There's no way out now.

Figure out what it is in life you don't do well, and then don't do it.

The harder you try to become the opposite of your parents, the more quickly you become them.

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.

Question: If there were two of you which one would win?

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.

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.

There's nothing at the center of what we do...No center. It doesn't exist. All of us-look at our lives: We have an acceptable level of affluence. We have entertainment. We have a relative freedom from fear. But there's nothing else.

Salad bars are like a restaurant's lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.

Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives?

Good looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters.

I am a quiet man. I tend to think things through and try not to say too much. But here I am, saying perhaps too much. But there are these feelings inside me which need badly to escape, I guess. And this makes me feel relieved because one of my big concerns these past few years is that I've been losing my ability to feel things with the same intensity- the way I felt when I was younger. It's scary- to feel your emotions floating away and just not caring. I guess what's really scary is not caring about the loss.

Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.

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

If you want to get close to somebody, you have to tell him or her something intimate about yourself. They'll tell you something intimate in return, and if you keep this going, maybe you'll end up in love.

We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.

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.

I am going to give you a piece of advice... advice I wish I'd been told in guidance class back in high school, in between the don't-do-acid and don't-drink-and-drive films. I wish our counselors had told us, 'When you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you. It's called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don't. Here is the list of the symptoms, and don't worry—loneliness is the most universal sensation on the planet. Just remember one fact—loneliness will pass. You will survive and you will be a better human for it.

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

If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?

Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.

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.

There's a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream.

Strange how when you're young you have no memories...Then one day you wake up and BOOM, memories overpower all else in your life, forever making the present moment seem sad and unable to compete with a glorious past that now has a life of its own.

Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don't work that way. French? Dieu! Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge.

The real killers in the business world aren't the ones who aim for the top, it's the ones who aim for two notches below the top.

As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.

If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you? It'll still be happening to an unchanged person.

One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.

Knee-Jerk Irony: The tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation.

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

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.

Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad lasts for very very long.

Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.

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.

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

With the first drink comes the truth, with the second drink comes wishful thinking, and with the third drink come the lies.

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

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

I say ‘Uhmm...’ a lot. I mentioned this to Karla and she says it’s a CPU word. It means you’re assembling data in your head - spooling.

Sometimes you can't realize you're in a bad mood until another person enters your orbit.

MID-TWENTIES BREAKDOWN: A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.

Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.

So where do you start when you want to start your life again?

Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words.

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 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.

If your life had lyrics, would they be any good?

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.

My mood has changed now. And the sun has gone behind the clouds. I'm in this mood I feel occasionally... this mood where there's a very good friend nearby who I should be phoning. If only I could reach that friend and talk, then everything would be just fine. The dilemma is, of course, I just don't know who that friend is. But in my heart I know my mood is merely me feeling disconnected from my true inner self.

When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.

The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth - it's about the redistribution of time.

Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.

Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?

Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.

I am reminded that no matter how hard you try, you can never be more than twelve years old with your parents. Parents earnestly try not to inflame, but their comments contain no scale and a strange focus. Discussing your private life with parents is like misguidedly looking at a zit in a car's rearview mirror and being convinced, in the absence of contrast or context, that you have developed combined heat rash and skin cancer.

Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.

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.

You guys just wait and see. We'll stand taller than these mountains. We'll bare open our hearts for the world to grab. We'll see lights where there was dimness. We'll testify together to what we have seen and felt. Life will go on--all of us--crawling; stumbling, falling perhaps. But we will be the strong ones. Our hearts will shine brightly.

In our heads we're all about 33 years old.

Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective.

It's difficult to speak with beautiful people. No matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise, you still want them to like you.

Blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos.

Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.

After you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of Earth? What one moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet? What's your takeaway? Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive.

Do you remember that old TV series, Get Smart? Do you remember at the beginning where Maxwell Smart is walking down the secret corridor and there are all of those doors that open sideways, and upside down and gateways and stuff? I think that everyone keeps a whole bunch of doors just like this between themselves and the world. But when you're in love, all of your doors are open, and all of their doors are open. And you roller-skate down your halls together.

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.

I didn't realize then that so much of being adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience

Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness.

Figure our what it is you don't do very well, and then don't do it. I'm not beating myself up about doing everything perfectly. The litmus test I always use for myself is: "Okay, if you won 20 million tomorrow in the lottery would you still being doing the same thing you are doing now with your life, Dough? The answer is "yes". I'm always very conscious of that.

On TV people look at your hair and then they look at your skin, and then they look at your clothes, and by the time they're listening to what you're saying, you're off the screen.

It's like male geeks don't know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it's a user interface problem. Not their fault. They'll just wait for the next version to come out- something more "user friendly.

Imagine you're a forty-year-old, Richard," Hamilton said to me around this time, while working as a salesman at a Radio Shack in Lynn Valley,"and suddenly somebody comes up to you saying, 'Hi, I'd like you to meet Kevin. Kevin is eighteen and will be making all of your career decisions for you.' I'd be flipped out. Wouldn't you? But that's what life is all about - some eighteen-year-old kid making your big decisions for you that stick for a lifetime." He shuddered.

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

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.

My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.

Star Trek characters never go shopping.

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

You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about by yourself.

I am aware that there is a world out there that functions without regard to me. There are wars and budgets and bombings and vast dimensions of wealth and greed and ambition and corruption. And yet I don't feel a part of that world, and I wouldn't know how to join if I tried.

Happy. And then I got afraid that it would vanish as quickly as it came. That it was accidental-- that I didn't deserve it. It's like this very, very nice car crash that never ends.

There are three things we cry for in life: things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.

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

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

Unhappy endings are just as important as happy endings. They’re an efficient way of transmitting vital Darwinian information. Your brain needs them to make maps of the world, maps that let you know what sorts of people and situations to avoid.

I guess the thing about exposing your heart is that people may not even notice it. Like a flop movie. Or they'll borrow your heart and they'll forget to return it to you.

In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where two people can finish each other's sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week.

You can only fall in love six times in your life. Choose wisely.

Adventure without risk is Disneyland.

You can never become rich unless you like rich people.

Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.

I think we're simply going to run out of Nature before we have a chance to destroy it.

Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now.

...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.

The past is a finite resource.

You can't get mad at weather because weather's not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life.

Lottery tickets are a surtax on desperation.

After my brush with the suicidal impulse, I listen with new ears to others when they speak on the subject. I think there are people who were born with that little door open, and they have to go through life knowing that they might jump through it at any moment.

How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we knit together this place we call the world? Without stories our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It's a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.

CONSENSUS TERRORISM:The process that decides in- office attitudes and behavior.

When the world throws you too much information, the only way you can stay sane or survive is to look for pattern recognition. Amidst all the blurs, is there a constellation that emerges, is there a straight line that's emerging. I think as long as you keep your mind in the palce where you're actively looking for patterns, you may not be safe, but you're going to feel safe, I think.

We're rapidly approaching a world comprised entirely of jail and shopping.

Negative? Moi? I think realistic might be a better word. You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don't have maybe just the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere has gone very very cuckoo?

...you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.