Douglas Coupland Quotes
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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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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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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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North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989.
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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 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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...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.
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What's the point of being efficient if you're only leading an efficiently blank life?
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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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Finally, my life was a story. My days would no longer feel like a video game that resets to zero every time I wake up, and then begs for coins. (p. 143)
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What if God exists except it turns out he doesn't really like people very much?
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New York is a theme park for people with IQs over 108.
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If cats were double the size they are now, they'd probably be illegal.
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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 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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Historical Slumming: The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural village - locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back - so as to experience relief when one returns back to 'the present.'
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God is what keeps us together after the love is gone.
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Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without.
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In Canada, we're happy to provide a safe haven for next-door neighbors in the middle of a marital dispute. And if anyone trips while crossing the border, we're happy to set their broken bones for free.
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Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words.
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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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Every single moment is a coincidence.
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In a faraway land called 'pre-2000,' what Earthlings now call blogging was called 'keeping a diary.' It's hard work to do well. I tried doing it in the early 1990s but had to stop because I no longer had a life - instead I had this thing that generated anecdotes to go into my diary. The diary took over and I had to stop.
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I kind of wonder if creativity is all morphing into one big thing that's not even art, but something universal and bigger.