Douglas Coupland Quotes
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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 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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It's fun to sentimentalize the 20th-century lifestyle and the 20th-century brain, but it helps nobody, it makes you look ancient, there's no going back, and you'd be miserable if you did.
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With 'Worst. Person. Ever.' I knew where it started and where it had to end, but I threw Raymond as many curveballs as I could along the way. He's like the coyote in the 'Road Runner' cartoons.
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In our heads we're all about 33 years old.
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Fame without the money to insulate you from it is one of the most wretched human conditions possible. (p. 80)
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Her friends have become who they've become by default. Their dreams are forgotten, or were never formulated to begin with.
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Only losers make decisions when things are bad. The time to rejig your life is the time when it's seemingly smooth.
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There's nothing at the center of what we do.
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The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.
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Hip flasks are the juice machines of the alcohol world - everyone has one and it never gets used.
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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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The way we experience history and time in all its forms shifted quite massively between 1989 and 2001 - to the point where contrivances like decades are now kind of silly.
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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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I like being surrounded by good ideas. Every single time you walk past something you like, you get a blast of happy chemicals to the brain, and I like that.
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There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.
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If you can control your emotions, chances are you don’t have too many.
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There's a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream.
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Nobody likes being told who or what they are.
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I miss my pre-Internet brain, but that doesn't help anything. We can only go forward.
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Historical Overdosing: to live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.
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I know it's not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli?
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It's sort of a law of the art world: The stuff that grows in importance is only the stuff you bought because it wowed you.
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At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?