Douglas Coupland Quotes
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Brazilification: The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.
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Being alive is just a brief technicality. (p. 167)
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Thinking you're immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal.
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I'm always looking for things that are so incredibly present that they become invisible.
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I don't know if it's a very smart idea to admire the living.
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'Why are we drinking Zima? It’s beyond irony. It’s not funny or anything. It’s just gross. Why not just serve us jugs of Hitler’s piss instead?''Drinking Zima is something Douglas Coupland would make a character do.''To what end?''It’d be a device that would allow him to locate the characters in time and a specific sort of culture.'
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Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.
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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.
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There was a fifteen-second patch of silence, then Craig said, 'Isn't it weird that Hotmail accounts still exist?' 'It really is,' said Bev. (p. 222)
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As a form of escapism, yearning for the 20th century is understandable, but in practice it would be horrible - sort of like going on a holiday promising yourself you could go without the Internet, only to crumble and walk in a daze to the local Internet cafe to gorge on connectivity.
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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.
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Forget about being world famous, it's hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.
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I can't switch time zones any more. London is one of my favourite places, but I'm always so zonked that I can't appreciate it. It's like a six-inch sheet of glass between me and Charing Cross Road.
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When you think about Twitter and you think what a dumb stupid throwaway technology, and then you have the Iranian elections and it actually saves the day - you can't prejudge technologies now because they have effects you may not have intended.
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If your life had lyrics, would they be any good?
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Make your goals big and broad enough so that they never become answered prayers and boomerang to curse you.
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Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.
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The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything.
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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.
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If you have a great idea, you should be able to communicate it as well. It's like the sound of one hand clapping. You have a great idea but aren't able to express it - well, how great was the idea?
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I think most people either forget or don't know that Microsoft only hires people with I.Q.'s well over 130.
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I keep vampire hours, going to bed at 2 A.M. and waking up at about 10:30-11 A.M.
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I get verklempt if I see a vintage TI-30 or TI-54 calculator. But I don't think I'd want to use one.
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It's weird when people start sentences with 'frankly' - as if their other sentences don't count.