Douglas Coupland Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Forgiveness is about empowering yourself, rather than empowering your past.
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I'm amused when Congress tries to place the blame on somebody but never themselves. I've never heard any of them ever say, 'I've made a mistake.' I do. I say I called it wrong. But they just try to find somebody to blame.
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I can't hear music. I don't understand it. It's so above and beyond me.
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At 12, turned 13, made a movie with Sex Pistols and The Clash. Learned about a lot of things I never knew and hope will never know again. Don't know how my parents let me do that.
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There is a solid satisfaction in one's having and being conscious that he merits the good opinion of men of true discernment and real worth. But to have a name among the weak and the wicked is shame and reproach.
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Around 2005, the Canadian army tapped me to do a dramatization for a series of foresight workshops they'd done. They had stacks of papers and needed it boiled down to something simple enough for a 4-star general to understand. We decided to do it as a story. That's how I created 'Crisis in Zefra.'
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Let's make math fun and sexy and glamorous. Smart is sexy, that's one of my main messages.
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Cotton was a force of nature. There's a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.
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Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.
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The tutor gave us our work, and if we had trouble, she'd help us on it, but we were really only working on the stuff that our school gave us - well, I was, because I go to a public school.
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NSA surveillance is a complex subject - legally, technically and operationally.
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Idiots. They were losing everything because of their short-sightedness. Maybe they deserved to lose it.
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My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) (6.54)
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You run into a party and a woman comes up to you. She's the most beautiful creature you ever saw — Ava Gardner — and says, 'I like you and why don't we get together?' What are you going to say, 'No'? You'd have to be an idiot. She was an incredible creature.
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There's not a single thing on offer in this all-too-temporary world for which you should ever sell your soul.
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He was as sentimental as Hitler about applause and crowds.
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When I feel like I'm not doing what I am supposed to as a mother, I will torture myself. I don't know how to deal with it. I find some consolation in the fact that all mommies feel it. If there was a way to cure mommy guilt, I would bottle it and be a bazillionaire.
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The Nobel prize is a fairytale for a week and a nightmare for a year. You can't imagine the pressure to give interviews, to go to book fairs.
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When it comes down to business, everybody is very businesslike... I have never felt any difficulty in dealing with any of these situations.
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All you have really to do is to keep your back as straight as you can; and not think about what is upon it. The real and essential meaning of 'virtue' is that straightness of back.
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I have little doubt that gerontologists will eventually find a way to avoid, or more likely, delay, the unpleasantries of extended life.
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I still pinch myself that I had the career that I had.
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Self-delusion is one of the funniest things there is.
