Douglas Coupland Quotes
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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.
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We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.
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It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn't go about their daily routine with the assumption that at any moment another massive media technology will be dumped on us by some geek in California.
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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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Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.
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Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.
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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.
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Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right.
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Vancouver is the square root of negative one. Technically it shouldn't exist, but it does. I can't imagine living anywhere else.
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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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Salad bars are like a restaurant's lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.
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I'm pro-forwards. Do I want the Seventies to come back? No. The haircuts were terrible. Everyone stank. The food was awful.
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There was a fifteen-second patch of silence, then Craig said, 'Isn't it weird that Hotmail accounts still exist?' 'It really is,' said Bev. (p. 222)
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I've always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writing, present tense, so write in the present as it is.
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With Google I'm starting to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. People in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.
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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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My life is neither a disaster nor supernatural, yet it is an unlikely event.
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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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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.
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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.
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Make your goals big and broad enough so that they never become answered prayers and boomerang to curse you.
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We were never supposed to live until 40. We were built to self-destruct at 30, whether from cancer or mental illness. We're all going way beyond our expiration date.
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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.
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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.