Douglas Coupland Quotes
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If your life had lyrics, would they be any good?
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Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.
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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.
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I'm starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don't have the broader trends like you used to.
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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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Her friends have become who they've become by default. Their dreams are forgotten, or were never formulated to begin with.
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You're smarter than TV. So what?
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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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It's weird when people start sentences with 'frankly' - as if their other sentences don't count.
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I think as a species we're not designed to be able to think more than one year into the future - if that. Even trying to imagine one year from now makes most people feel like they've been given a huge boring chunk of homework that's too hard to do.
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Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.
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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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Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness.
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Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.
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Whatever happened to books? Suddenly everybody's talking about these 100-hour movies called 'Breaking Bad'. People are talking about TV the same way they used to talk about novels back in the 1980s. I like to think I hang out with some pretty smart people, but all they talk about is 'Breaking Bad.'
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A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.
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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.
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In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.
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I'm not patient - and I'm getting more impatient as I get older - but I am disciplined about writing, and I want that on my tombstone: 'He wasn't patient, but he was disciplined.'
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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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Aliens didn't come down to Earth and give us technology. We invented it ourselves. Therefore it can never be alienating; it can only be an expression of our humanity.
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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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Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?
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...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.