Douglas Coupland Quotes
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The harder you try to become the opposite of your parents, the more quickly you become them.
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You worry that if you lower your guard, even for one second, your whole world will disintegrate into chaos.
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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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Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.
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The future and eternity are two entirely different things.
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The universe hands you opportunities for a while, and if you don't take them, the universe says to itself, 'Oh I see, this person doesn't like opportunities' and stops giving them to you.
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If I don't learn something new every year, I go crazy.
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Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long.
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People like that woman make it clear just how asinine it is to believe that human beings have some kind of in-built universal sense of goodness. These days I think that everybody's just one spit away from being a mall bomber.
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The two of you start talking about your feelings and your feelings float outside of you like vapors, and they mix together like a fog. Before you realize it, the two of you have become the same mist and you realize you can never return to being just a lone cloud again, because the isolation would be intolerable.
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If cats were double the size they are now, they'd probably be illegal.
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If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?
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Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.
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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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The Internet has destroyed irony in the world, or at least wounded it considerably. What are we to do about an invention whose end result is that starving people in China are looking up things on marthastewart.com?
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You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.
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You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young.
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We are at the vanguard of adolescent protraction.
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Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounded like a quiet tragedy.
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Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.
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In 2008 we came perilously close to killing money, exposing in the process how out of date money's infrastructure has become.
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We are a dreadful species indeed, and deserve whatever it is our techno-baubles do to us.
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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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'I have an idea. … If Ethan and Mark are so similar, we might as well arbitrarily assign them distinct personality traits. I know-Mark, from here on, you're to be called 'Evil Mark.''