Home > Author > Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland QUOTES

1 " Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony. "

― Douglas Coupland , Shampoo Planet

2 " Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy. "

― Douglas Coupland , Life After God

3 " My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments—we hear a word that sticks in our mind—or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly—we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen—or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station.

And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection—certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether; one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real—this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives. "

― Douglas Coupland , Life After God

4 " Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more. "

― Douglas Coupland

5 " She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living? "

― Douglas Coupland , All Families are Psychotic

6 " A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal. "

― Douglas Coupland , The Gum Thief

7 " By the age of twenty, you know you're not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you're not going to be a dentist or any kind of professional. And by thirty, darkness starts moving in- you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy and successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life, and you become resigned to your fate...

...I mean, why do people live so long? What could be the difference between death at fifty-five and death at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five? Those extra years... what benefit could they possibly have? Why do we go on living even though nothing new happens, nothing new is learned, and nothing new is transmitted? At fifty-five, your story's pretty much over. "

― Douglas Coupland , Player One: What Is to Become of Us (CBC Massey Lectures)

8 " We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die. "

― Douglas Coupland

9 " TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public. "

― Douglas Coupland , JPod

10 " I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts. "

― Douglas Coupland , The Gum Thief

Douglas Coupland QUOTES

11 " ...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes. "

― Douglas Coupland , The Gum Thief

12 " You should be spreading the good word. You should be etching the good word onto the glass scanning beds of library photocopiers. You should be scraping the truth onto old auto parts and throwing them off bridges so that people digging in the mud in a million years will question the world, too. You should be carving eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe soles so that your every trail speaks of thinking and faith and belief. You should be designing molecules that crystallize into poems of devotion. You should be making bar codes that print out truth, not lies. You shouldn't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has the truth stamped on it--a demand for people to reach a finer place!

...Your new life will be tinged with urgency, as though you're digging out the victims of an avalanche. If you're not spending every waking moment of your life living the truth, if you're not plotting every moment to boil the carcass of the old order, then you're wasting your day. "

― Douglas Coupland , Player One: What Is to Become of Us (CBC Massey Lectures)

13 " Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that He created an
order for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles,
we're also asking that He unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles
would be a cartoon, not a world. "

― Douglas Coupland , Hey Nostradamus!

14 " At least there's nothing scary about him and hopefully he doesn't see anything scary in me. We go way back, to summer camp. We KNOW each other. People I don't know just make me want to say YIKES! I'll take history over mystery any day of the week. "

― Douglas Coupland , Shampoo Planet

15 " And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened. "

― Douglas Coupland , Life After God

16 " Sometimes we all forget that the world itself is paradise, and there has been much of late to enourage that amnesia. (Microserfs, p 366) "

― Douglas Coupland , Microserfs

17 " Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster. "

― Douglas Coupland , Life After God

18 " We can no longer create the feeling of an era...of time being particular to one spot in time. "

― Douglas Coupland , Microserfs

19 " Is that all time is - our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass? "

― Douglas Coupland , Player One: What Is to Become of Us (CBC Massey Lectures)

20 " And the reason Luke is thinking about time and free will is because he believes that money is the closest human beings have ever come to crystallizing time and free will into a compact physical form. Cash. Cash is a time crystal. Cash allows you to multiply your will, and it allows you to speed up time. Cash is what defines us as a species. Nothing else in the universe has money. "

― Douglas Coupland , Player One: What Is to Become of Us (CBC Massey Lectures)