Douglas Coupland Quotes
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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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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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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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'Stupidity' defines the mental state wherein we acknowledge that we've never been smarter as individuals and yet somehow we've never felt stupider. We now collectively inhabit a state of stupidity.
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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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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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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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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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It can be really fun to go down with the ship.
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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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Being asked what animal you'd like to be is a trick question; you're already an animal.
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In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.
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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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I don't like telephones: I don't like when they ring. Just because it rings, you have to pick it up. I don't even like opening mail; I'm weird.
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Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive.
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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 wish my parents took good care of their grow-op.'
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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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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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Ethan is annoyed with all of these dumb campaigns that indoctrinate millions of people into thinking they’re tough-guy free spirits when, in fact, there’s probably much to be said for following and, in any event, the food chain isn’t structured to encompass millions of non-followers.
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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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Most time capsules, when they're unearthed, are really awful. There's nothing good in them.
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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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I think half the people who get married now have met online. If I think about all the people in my life who married - they met online, online, online. And it makes sense if you think about it, because you fill out this form of 35 things that really define you and - bam - look, you've got two people who match. It works.