Coupland Quotes

Nobody ever mentions the good side of OxyContin: It makes you feel like Jesus fucking a horse. ~ Douglas Coupland

I've given up wanting to make a killing or be a bigshot. I just want to find happiness and maybe open up a little roadside cafe in Idaho. ~ Douglas Coupland

Besides, animals don't even have time. Only humans have time. It's what makes us different. ~ Douglas Coupland

Because in the end we forget everything, anyway. We're human; we're amnesia machines. ~ Douglas Coupland

I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst? ... If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet
with just one person inside even
I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does. ~ Douglas Coupland

We can no longer create the feeling of an era ... of time being particular to one spot in time. ~ Douglas Coupland

The sixties are like a theme park to them. They wear the costume, buy their tickets, and they have the experience. ~ Douglas Coupland

People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that's always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge you're free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else. ~ Douglas Coupland

I like the present. I'm always interested in new ideas, and what's happening. I'm not nostalgic. ~ Douglas Coupland

A vast percentage of the human race is literally not wired neurologically to get irony. Well more than half of humanity takes life at face value, which is to me terrifying. ~ Douglas Coupland

I walked far down a dirt side road and into a farmer's field - some sort of cereal that was chest high and corn green and rustled as its blades inflicted small paper burns on my skin as I walked through them. And in that field, when the appointed hour, minute, and second of the darkness came, I lay myself down on the ground, surrounded by the tall pithy grain stalks and the faint sound of insects, and held my breath, there experiencing a mood that I have never really been able to shake completely - a mood of darkness and inevitability and facination - a mood that surely must have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out. ~ Douglas Coupland

You've seen what you've seen; you've felt what you've felt. Ideology is for people who don't trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world. ~ Douglas Coupland

The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would. ~ Douglas Coupland

We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude. ~ Douglas Coupland

Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure. ~ Douglas Coupland

What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation. ~ Douglas Coupland

I seriously wish that he had spent his entire childhood being serially arse-raped by teachers, scoutmasters, members of the clergy, relatives, policemen, doctors, door-to-door salesmen and all registered sex offenders within a 500-mile radius of his unprotected bedroom. ~ Douglas Coupland

The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything. ~ Douglas Coupland

Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space. ~ Douglas Coupland

I'm starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don't have the broader trends like you used to. ~ Douglas Coupland

And so the point of this story is that when I first met you at the photocopy machine, sure, we talked like a telethon and everything, but the perfume you were wearing then - that perfume was the smell of my stamp album, the smell of countries I always wanted to visit but never thought I'd be able to. It was like you had the world inside you. ~ Douglas Coupland

Vaccinated Time Travel: To fantasize about traveling backward in time, but only with proper vaccinations. ~ Douglas Coupland

Fate is for losers. ~ Douglas Coupland

I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements. ~ Douglas Coupland

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is fantastic. It's volcanic and sexy and utterly unlike anything I've read before. It feels like the future in a dazzling way that has nothing to do with looking backward. It's been a long wait for a new novel from Mark Leyner, but worth it. Ten out of ten from me. ~ Douglas Coupland

I will say that my days are spent solitary and somewhat lost in thought, and every single time I inadvertently wear my shirt inside out in public, I bump into my sister-in-law at the grocery store. ~ Douglas Coupland

But if you accept dreams, you also have to accept nightmares, and I know nightmares are bad things. And if dreams are so special, why is it that no person or company has ever tried to make a drug that leads to better dreaming? Sleeping pills, yes, but dreaming pills? Have scientists even asked that question? ~ Douglas Coupland

It's around midnight. After I left Dad, my choice was to either become very drunk or write this. I
chose to write this. It felt kind of now-or-never for me. ~ Douglas Coupland

Time erases both the best and the worst of us. ~ Douglas Coupland

Worrying about money is one of the worst worries. It's like having locked-in syndrome, except you're still moving around and doing things. Your head burns. If other people are not having money problems, it pisses you off because it reminds you that you're limited in the ways you can express your agency in the world, and they aren't. Worrying about money is anger-inducing because it makes you think about time: how many dollars per hour, how much salary per year, how many years until retirement. Worrying about money forces you to do endless math in your head, and most people didn't like math in high school and they don't like it now. ~ Douglas Coupland

In the old days people had far fewer channels in which to place their imaginative time. There's definitely more competition for time ... and yet people seem to be reading [books] as much. ~ Douglas Coupland

I think as a species we're not designed to be able to think more than one year into the future - if that. Even trying to imagine one year from now makes most people feel like they've been given a huge boring chunk of homework that's too hard to do. ~ Douglas Coupland

Shopping is Not Creating. ~ Douglas Coupland

What is human behavior, except trying to prove that we're not animals? ~ Douglas Coupland

I was so beautiful when I was young. And I took so few photos because I felt so skinny and ugly. I wish I'd just taken a few more shots. ~ Douglas Coupland

It's amazing how you can be a total shithead, and yet your soul still wants to hang out with you. ~ Douglas Coupland

The neighborhood I grew up in had this fence that surrounds the watershed. And if you go on the other side of that fence, there's nothing until the North Pole and down to Siberia. It's the absolute cutoff point between man and nature. ~ Douglas Coupland

Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life. ~ Douglas Coupland

And when you meet someone and fall in love, and they fall in love with you, you ask them "Will you take my heart
stains and all?" and they say "I will," and they ask you the same question and you say, "I will," too. ~ Douglas Coupland

I connect fashion to other peoples' elegance, but not my own. I don't think I've ever felt elegant. I've felt appropriate, but never elegant, and I wonder what that must be like. I like it when other people are elegant - I prefer it - but I can't do it myself. I honestly think it's some form of autistic disorder. ~ Douglas Coupland

But that's what family members are for. We crave them and need them not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about but because they know precisely which subjects to avoid. ~ Douglas Coupland

And I wondered then, how do we ever know what beauty lies inside of people, and the strange ways this world works to lure that beauty outward? ~ Douglas Coupland

I've become a day writer: most people start as night writers, and I used to be, but something happened to my endocrine system. I do miss the 3 A.M. writing jags. ~ Douglas Coupland

By your thirties, you should be doing whatever it is you're supposed to be doing with your life and just get on with it - which is what I suppose happened with me as much as to anyone else. ~ Douglas Coupland

If he'd learned one thing while he'd been away, it was that loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears out a room. ~ Douglas Coupland

Why are we even here [on earth], what's our human nature? It's precipitating a real philosophical crisis that I find quite fascinating. ~ Douglas Coupland

Okay, I know--my superpower--I'd be able to shoot lightening bolts out from my fingertips--great big knowledge network lightening bolts--and when a person was zapped by one of those bolts, they'd fall down on their knees and once on their knees, they'd be under water, in this place I saw once off the east coast of the Bahamas, a place where a billion electric blue fish swam up to me and made me a part of their school--and then they'd be up in the air, up in Manhattan, above the World Trade Center, with a flock of pigeons, flying amid the skyscrapers, and then--then what? And then they'd go blind, and then they'd be taken away--they'd feel homesick--more homesick than they'd felt in their entire life--so homesick they were throwing up--and they'd be abandoned, I don't know...in the middle of a harvested corn field in Missouri. And then they'd be able to see again, and from the edges of the field people would appear--everybody they'd known--and they'd be carrying Black Forest cakes and burning tiki lamps and boom boxes playing the same song, and they sky would turn into a sunset, the way it does in Walt Disney brochure, and the person I zapped would never be alone or isolated again. ~ Douglas Coupland

Jason said, "Yes. Gerard T. Giraffe."
What does the 'T' stand for?"
'The. ~ Douglas Coupland

On TV people look at your hair and then they look at your skin, and then they look at your clothes, and by the time they're listening to what you're saying, you're off the screen. ~ Douglas Coupland

I've never gone on Facebook or MySpace. ~ Douglas Coupland

There's nothing cure or funny or lovable about being cheap. It's a total turn-off. ~ Douglas Coupland

The 1990s felt like the 1990s in a real and good way. ~ Douglas Coupland

Your body isn't just a body. It's an ecosystem. ~ Douglas Coupland

Sometimes I think the people to feel the saddest for are people who are unable to connect with the profound - people such as my boring brother-in-law, a hearty type so concerned with normality and fitting in that he eliminates any possibility of uniqueness for himself and his own personality. I wonder if some day, when he is older, he will wake up and the deeper part of him will realize that he has never allowed himself to truly exist, and he will cry with regret and shame and grief. ~ Douglas Coupland

In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where two people can finish each other's sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week. ~ Douglas Coupland

Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being. ~ Douglas Coupland

I'd change you bandages for you, but you don't have any and that's a big issue here. ~ Douglas Coupland

Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships. ~ Douglas Coupland

Knee-Jerk Irony: The tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation. ~ Douglas Coupland

Sometimes you can't realize you're in a bad mood until another person enters your orbit. ~ Douglas Coupland

I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints ... I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does. ~ Douglas Coupland

I've had maybe 20 jobs, big and small, and I've never hated any of them. At the same time, the moment the learning curve flattened, I was out of there. ~ Douglas Coupland

It's sort of a law of the art world: The stuff that grows in importance is only the stuff you bought because it wowed you. ~ Douglas Coupland

People are leaky. ~ Douglas Coupland

MCJOB: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice for people who have never held one. ~ Douglas Coupland

Is that all time is - our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass? ~ Douglas Coupland

Fun fact: The United Nations building in New York City is the only place in all of North America where smoking is still permitted indoors. ~ Douglas Coupland

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

Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar. ~ Douglas Coupland

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car. ~ Douglas Coupland

the BIG issue nowadays is that on TV and in magazines, the images we see, while they appear surreal, "really aren't surrealistic, because they're just random, and there's no subconsciousness underneath to generate the images. ~ Douglas Coupland

New York is a theme park for people with IQs over 108. ~ Douglas Coupland

Claire put scientifically enhanced popcorn in the microwave oven. "I never feel like I'm putting food in one of these things," she then says, entering with beeps, the time-set into the LED. "It feels more like I'm inserting fuel rods into a core. ~ Douglas Coupland

It'd be preposterous for me to propose a universal cure to loneliness but I will say that people who do the things they find interesting, either creatively or vocationally, tend to become unlonely very quickly. ~ Douglas Coupland

OPTION PARALYSIS: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none. ~ Douglas Coupland

Maybe thinking you're supposed to 'have a life' is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be. How do we know that all of these people with 'no lives' aren't really on the new frontier of human sentience and preceptions? ~ Douglas Coupland

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. ~ Douglas Coupland

In a faraway land called 'pre-2000,' what Earthlings now call blogging was called 'keeping a diary.' It's hard work to do well. I tried doing it in the early 1990s but had to stop because I no longer had a life - instead I had this thing that generated anecdotes to go into my diary. The diary took over and I had to stop. ~ Douglas Coupland

Nothing very, very good and nothing very, very bad ever lasts for very very long. ~ Douglas Coupland

If money is not maintained, it can collapse like a bridge along Interstate 5 and fixing it, even with determined politicians, will take ages, during which time God only knows how much human damage will occur. ~ Douglas Coupland

I think Americans are weirdly puritanistic about psychopharmaceuticals. There are millions of people out there who would otherwise be dead or rocking by themselves in a corner who now lead full and normal lives because of amazing and wonderful scientific advances. ~ Douglas Coupland

I've never really seen too much difference between writing or making visual art or designing furniture or clothing. It's still my brain - I'm just using different parts of it for different things. ~ Douglas Coupland

I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C's and D's. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room. ~ Douglas Coupland

What else? I also believe that if someone comes up behind you on the freeway and flashes their lights to get you to move into the slow lane, they deserve whatever punishment you dole out to them. I promptly slow down and drive at the same speed as the car beside me so that I can punish Speed Racer for his impertinence.
Actually, it's not the impertinence I'm punishing him for, it's that he let other people know what he wanted.
Speed Racer, my friend, never ever let people know what you want. Because if you do, you might as well send them engraved invitations saying, Hi, this is what I want you to prevent me from ever having. ~ Douglas Coupland

I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and rename three o'clock 'Pepsi.' ~ Douglas Coupland

If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil. ~ Douglas Coupland

I have trouble with seafood because it tastes like a dock. ~ Douglas Coupland

The belief that tomorrow is a different place from today is certainly a unique hallmark of our species. ~ Douglas Coupland

What about life after death?" "What about death after life after death? ~ Douglas Coupland

I would like to fall in love again but my only hope is that love doesn't happen to me so often after this. I don't want to get so used to falling in love that i get curious to experience something more extreme - whatever that may be. ~ Douglas Coupland

Adventure without risk is Disneyland. ~ Douglas Coupland

The whole point of Gen X was, and continues to be, a negation of being forced into Baby Boomerdom against one's will. ~ Douglas Coupland

We are a dreadful species indeed, and deserve whatever it is our techno-baubles do to us. ~ Douglas Coupland

Please, God, don't let Warren be cheap. I'm too young to discuss coupons. ~ Douglas Coupland

If you want to get close to somebody, you have to tell him or her something intimate about yourself. They'll tell you something intimate in return, and if you keep this going, maybe you'll end up in love. ~ Douglas Coupland

You like all animals at that moment, although no doubt you will one day choose your favorites. Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures. You popped out of your mother's belly, I saw your eyes, and I knew that you were already you. And I think back over my own 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. Sometimes I wonder if natures can be changed at all of if we are stuck with them as surely as a dog wants bones or as a cat chases mice. ~ Douglas Coupland

[ ... ] and after those big strokes, what's to tell? We run out of things that make us individual very quickly; all of us have far more in common than we do not have in common. ~ Douglas Coupland

Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you. ~ Douglas Coupland

Brain research tells us that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony, which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value. ~ Douglas Coupland

Imagine you're a forty-year-old, Richard," Hamilton said to me around this time, while working as a salesman at a Radio Shack in Lynn Valley,"and suddenly somebody comes up to you saying, 'Hi, I'd like you to meet Kevin. Kevin is eighteen and will be making all of your career decisions for you.' I'd be flipped out. Wouldn't you? But that's what life is all about - some eighteen-year-old kid making your big decisions for you that stick for a lifetime." He shuddered. ~ Douglas Coupland