Douglas Coupland Quotes
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I think about how I think I know a person then 'poof!' I discover I only knew a cartoon version. Suddenly there's this fleshy, demanding, noisy creature in front of me, unknowable and just as lost as I am, and equally unable to remember that every soul in the world is hurting, not just themselves.
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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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It's difficult to speak with beautiful people. No matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise, you still want them to like you.
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If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you?
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'A girl can’t control who will and who won’t fall in love with her, Ethan. And sometimes, when a nuisance person falls in love with you, it can be awfully… awkward.'
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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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What if God exists except it turns out he doesn't really like people very much?
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If cats were double the size they are now, they'd probably be illegal.
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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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If you have an impulse to kindness, act on it.
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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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You can't get mad at weather because weather's not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life.
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I think Americans are weirdly puritanistic about psychopharmaceuticals. There are millions of people out there who would otherwise be dead or rocking by themselves in a corner who now lead full and normal lives because of amazing and wonderful scientific advances.
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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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Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without.
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Emotional Ketchup Burst: The bottling up of opinions and emotions inside onself so that they explosively burst forth all at once, shocking and confusing employers and friends - most of whom thought things were fine.
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No-tech tourism is a form of temporal eco-tourism in which one reads books or watches film and TV precisely because of the absence of 21st-century technologies.
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If I don't learn something new every year, I go crazy.
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Don’t you get an empty feeling in your soul when you have a blank to-do list?
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I mean five thousand years ago people emerge out of nowhere - sproing!- with brains and everything and begin wrecking the planet. You'd think we'd give the issue a little more thought than we do.
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Ten commandments yet seven deadly sins: conflict?
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Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.
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When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.
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I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and rename three o'clock 'Pepsi.'