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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What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.
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When I see Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk, it's only a picture. My imagination has to do some of the work there, to impute feeling and everything. We're talking about something that's so surreal, it's just not possible within the world as we know it. So that requires a form that is not so literal.
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Talent isn't really enough to make it in any world. If you're trying to be a superstar, or at the highest rate of fame, you have to have personality too. You have to be a well-rounded person. It takes way more than talent nowadays.
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Mean is easy. Mean is lazy. Mean is self-satisfied and slothful.
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It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.
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Self-delusion is one of the funniest things there is.
