Douglas Coupland Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Telling people they look relaxed makes them look relaxed.
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Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.
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You can't fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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Sometimes I wonder if the world is too interesting and too boring at the same time.
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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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'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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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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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.
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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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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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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.