Douglas Coupland Quotes
-
...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.
-
Once you establish a look, and once everybody recognizes that look as your look, you never have to think about fashion again.
-
If your life had lyrics, would they be any good?
-
Every single moment is a coincidence.
-
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.'
-
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.
-
You still don't know what you do well.
-
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.
-
I think that to acknowledge a new generation is to acknowledge some degree of obsolescence in yourself, and that is very hard to do and often comes with undeniable anger.
-
Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.
-
I think way back, the '20s or the '30s, when Kodak came out with the Brownie and they put a list of instructions on the box, like how to use this thing, I think someone arbitrarily said, 'Make sure the person in the photograph is smiling.' And we went from that one sort of set of industrial instructions to this whole culture of perkiness.
-
You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.
-
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.
-
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.'
-
North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989.
-
I keep vampire hours, going to bed at 2 A.M. and waking up at about 10:30-11 A.M.
-
I told Ethan that I speak in an unrestricted manner to animals - things like, aren't you just the cutest little kitty... that kind of thing, which I wouldn't dream of doing to humans. Then I realized I wish I could.
-
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.
-
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.
-
If cats were double the size they are now, they'd probably be illegal.
-
When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.
-
If our subconscious was attractive, we wouldn't have to bury it down deep within us.
-
I hear that God has a really bad haircut.
-
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.