Douglas Coupland Quotes
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I'm always looking for things that are so incredibly present that they become invisible.
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Language is such a technology.
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You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.
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Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness.
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When you're young you always feel that life hasn't yet begun...But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive.
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The thing about the end of the world is that not just the West collapses, the whole world does.
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What is the one thing more than any other thing that makes one person different from any other person?
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There used to be a tradition of the loveable rogue who would steal from the honour boxes in churches and buy a round of drinks with the money he snagged. And everyone would find him tremendously good company. But not any more.
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Money isn't money anymore. Time doesn't feel like time anymore. Your sense of community, it's evaporated, too, or it's turned into something you visit at 2 A.M. on a website.
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Adventure without risk is Disneyland.
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Mediums change you by their very existence. They do this on fundamental levels because they force you to favour certain parts of your brain over others.
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The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.
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Clowns drink to blot out the ravages of terrifying children for a living.
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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.
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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.
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Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one's taking.
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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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Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.
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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.
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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 you're not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world - if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order - then you're wasting your day.
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''Is the hotel Marge? It has to be Marge. I want atmosphere.' Marge is Anna-Louise's word describing sad, 1950s-ish diner-type places where the waitresses are named Marge.'
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If you waste five minutes of time a day, over the course of a year that adds up to one full work day. Think of five wasted minutes as a slow-release holiday drug. Savour it.
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Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.