Douglas Coupland Quotes
-
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.
-
My life is neither a disaster nor supernatural, yet it is an unlikely event.
-
You can't fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.
-
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.
-
Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.
-
McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.
-
If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.
-
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.
-
The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would.
-
I'm pro-forwards. Do I want the Seventies to come back? No. The haircuts were terrible. Everyone stank. The food was awful.
-
It also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present, future or past, either.
-
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?
-
In the future, IKEA will become an ever more spiritual sanctuary. In the future, your dream life will increasingly look like Google street view. Everyone will be feeling the same way as you, and there's some comfort to be found there.
-
If God drives a car, He'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, with oxblood leather upholstery and an opera window.
-
Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.
-
A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.
-
It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.
-
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.
-
Sometimes I wonder if the world is too interesting and too boring at the same time.
-
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.
-
I'm trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition.
-
When I look at my daily schedule, I feel like a trout flopping about on a dock, drowning in the air. Some people are ruthless with their schedules. Not me. I wing it.
-
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.
-
Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.