Douglas Coupland Quotes
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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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'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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Fame without the money to insulate you from it is one of the most wretched human conditions possible. (p. 80)
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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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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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It also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present, future or past, either.
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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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I miss my pre-Internet brain, but that doesn't help anything. We can only go forward.
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By your thirties, you should be doing whatever it is you're supposed to be doing with your life and just get on with it - which is what I suppose happened with me as much as to anyone else.
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Veal-Fattening Pen: Small, cramped office workstations built of fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions and inhabited by junior staff members. Named after the small preslaughter cubicles used by the cattle industry.
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I was Cheryl Anway- that has to count for something.
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I love working out how things are made, which is why I have so many models of towers.
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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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Star Trek characters never go shopping.
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I thought that intimacy with another soul was the closest I could ever come to leaving my body.
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The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.
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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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If nothing else, we simply get used to being alive.
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The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth, it's about the redistribution of time.
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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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Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
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There's a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream.
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Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.
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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.