Douglas Coupland Quotes
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'I wish my parents took good care of their grow-op.'
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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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God is what keeps us together after the love is gone.
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North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989.
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In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.
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Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?
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We had all awakened X number of years past our youth feeling sleazy and harsh. Choices still existed, but they were no longer infinite. Fun had become a scrim, concealing the hysteria that lay behind it.
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'We call Jasmine's room 'The Harem,' a sexy place, about which Dan never complained, even though his own possessions, his laptop PC and briefcase, for example, looked crazy in the environment, invasive and overcomplex, like Stealth bombers in SmurfWorld.'
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Where does personality end and brain damage begin?
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'Grandpa, like most of the fun-loving gang who built the Plants, just wanted to die or have his brain turn to oatmeal before it becomes too apparent exactly what a nightmare he and his buddies have saddled their descendants with.'
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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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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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It can be really fun to go down with the ship.
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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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It's weird when people start sentences with 'frankly' - as if their other sentences don't count.
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New York is a theme park for people with IQs over 108.
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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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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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Tofu hot dogs are actually scarier than real hot dogs. It's like wanting the worst possible meat product without even the thrill of it actually being meat.
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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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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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Every single moment is a coincidence.
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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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'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.