Douglas Coupland Quotes
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Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.
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There's nothing cure or funny or lovable about being cheap. It's a total turn-off.
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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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Fashion only seems to make sense if it's rooted in some dimension of history or if it feels like a continuation of an idea.
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Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures... And I think back over my life and I realize that my own nature -the core me- essentially hasn't changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.
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Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a series of events - a story - and when we can’t figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow.
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We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.
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Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.
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'To be merely good enough is to never succeed.'
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I'm suspicious of places that look decorated. I can understand why people do it, but you see too many cushions or a piece of fabric hanging and it's, like, 'Ugh!' A good house with good art will always work, no matter what.
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The hardest things in the world are being unique and having your life be a story. In the old days, it was much easier, but our modern fame-driven culture, with its real-time 24-7 marinade of electronic information, demands a lot from modern citizens, and poses great obstacles to narrative.
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When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.
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'You're never too old to dance, Dad...and you're never too old to dream.''That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard you say. Were you saying that with irony or for real?'
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Money is more than a massively consensual IOU note. It is a piece of infrastructure and is as artificial as Interstate 5, NutraSweet or season three of 'Mad Men.'
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Games I do find interesting for what they say about us, about what we wish for, about the programming. But let it stop there: don't listen to this rubbish about them actually being good for you, helping with hand-eye co-ordination or whatever. They're games. They prepare you for nothing.
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Telling people they look relaxed makes them look relaxed.
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You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.
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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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I think most people either forget or don't know that Microsoft only hires people with I.Q.'s well over 130.
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I don't know how anyone gets anything done in cities. How can you live somewhere like London or New York, when there are 81 things to do every night? Awful. Give me solitude and space any time.
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Given the infinite number of coincidences that could happen, very few ever actually do. The universe exists in a coincidence-hating state of anti-fluke.
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Scrape. Feel. Dig. Believe. Ask.
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The advent of cellphones may, in the end, be no more relevant than the ability of laptops to change our written documents into ones using cool new fonts.
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You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about by yourself.