Douglas Coupland Quotes
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Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you.
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If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.
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When Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, was he trading up or trading down?
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Clique Maintenance: The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: Kids today do nothing. They’re so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain.
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I have trouble with seafood because it tastes like a dock.
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Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.
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Figure out what it is in life you don't do well, and then don't do it.
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Brain research tells us that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony, which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value.
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A vast percentage of the human race is literally not wired neurologically to get irony. Well more than half of humanity takes life at face value, which is to me terrifying.
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Truly modern citizens are both charismatic and can only respond to other people with charisma. To survive, people need to become self-branding charisma robots. Yet, ironically, society mocks and punishes people who aspire to that state.
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The real killers in the business world aren't the ones who aim for the top, it's the ones who aim for two notches below the top.
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Comedy is the difference between how you see a person and how they see themselves.
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High school is such a shared experience in North American culture.
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In our heads we're all about 33 years old.
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'I have this theory about smart people. If you’re smart, you’re either the only person in your family who’s smart, or everybody in the family is smart. No in-between.'I considered this. 'I think I come from the everybody’s smart category. But they don’t apply their smarts to… larger picture pursuits. That includes me.'
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Preemptive boringness. Being one-dimensional is the most satisfying method of coping with out-of-control people - with any situation that's out of control … Don't let people know the ideas you love, the games you've played, the places you've visited in your mind. Keep your treasure to yourself.
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Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.
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As he ages and sees more of the world, he’s realizing that bad news is a part of life, and that when you have to give it, just say it and get it over with.
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If you can control your emotions, chances are you don’t have too many.
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If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.
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Star Trek characters never go shopping.
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Your body isn't just a body. It's an ecosystem.
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Lottery tickets are a surtax on desperation.
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Time perception is very much about how you sequence your activities, how many activities you layer overtop of others, and the types of gaps, if any, you leave in between activities.