Top 539 Quotes & Sayings by Douglas Coupland
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland.
Last updated on November 3, 2024.
It's difficult to speak with beautiful people. No matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise, you still want them to like you.
Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.
Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
When we constantly ask for miracles, we're unraveling the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would not be a world, it would be a cartoon.
Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.
Blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos.
You can't fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.
Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.
I've got 911 on speed dial.
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.
Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? Well, that's where all the other jobs that once made us middle class are going, to that same magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel agency jobs vanished, never to return.
Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine.
There's a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream.
I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along.
Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.
If you have an impulse to kindness, act on it.
When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.
I miss the silliness of the Nineties. What would society be like if 9/11 never happened? If that silliness was extended forever?
You can only fall in love six times in your life. Choose wisely.
I miss my pre-Internet brain, but that doesn't help anything. We can only go forward.
When Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, was he trading up or trading down?
When the world throws you too much information, the only way you can stay sane or survive is to look for pattern recognition. Amidst all the blurs, is there a constellation that emerges, is there a straight line that's emerging?
Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.
Every single moment is a coincidence.
Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.
Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.
I think that to acknowledge a new generation is to acknowledge some degree of obsolescence in yourself, and that is very hard to do and often comes with undeniable anger.
Lottery tickets are a surtax on desperation.
Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.
You can't get mad at weather because weather's not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life.
Vancouver is the square root of negative one. Technically it shouldn't exist, but it does. I can't imagine living anywhere else.
Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long.
If cats were double the size they are now, they'd probably be illegal.
If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.
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.'
Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.
To have a healthy culture, you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don't have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.
Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.
Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.
There used to be a tradition of the loveable rogue who would steal from the honour boxes in churches and buy a round of drinks with the money he snagged. And everyone would find him tremendously good company. But not any more.
Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo.
The real killers in the business world aren't the ones who aim for the top, it's the ones who aim for two notches below the top.
Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.
Flying dreams mean that you're doing the right thing with your life.
One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.
People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.
If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you?
I'm not a hoarder, I'm a collector: if you have something you like, every time you see it, you have a little happy hit.
You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young.
Adventure without risk is Disneyland.
You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about by yourself.
Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.
The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.
Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel. The smell. Try and you can't. The brain doesn't process negatives.
Sometimes I wonder if the world is too interesting and too boring at the same time.
The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.
The harder you try to become the opposite of your parents, the more quickly you become them.
Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.
There are three things we cry about in life, things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.
Comedy is the difference between how you see a person and how they see themselves.
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