Top 539 Quotes & Sayings by Douglas Coupland - Page 2

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.

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.

I'm not patient - and I'm getting more impatient as I get older - but I am disciplined about writing, and I want that on my tombstone: 'He wasn't patient, but he was disciplined.'

I get verklempt if I see a vintage TI-30 or TI-54 calculator. But I don't think I'd want to use one.

What if God exists except it turns out he doesn't really like people very much?

I decided at 40 I was wasting entire chunks of my brain and didn't want to blow my one chance on Earth. I'm glad I made that decision. Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space. Sometimes, as with film, you can hybridize, but I think it's basically the space part of my brain wanting equal footing with the time part.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I don't like telephones: I don't like when they ring. Just because it rings, you have to pick it up. I don't even like opening mail; I'm weird.

I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.

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

The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth, it's about the redistribution of time.

Gap clothing allows you to look like you're from nowhere and anywhere.

I always thought of words as art supplies.

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.

Quick. Name ten dead redheads.

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

Once you establish a look, and once everybody recognizes that look as your look, you never have to think about fashion again.

Being asked what animal you'd like to be is a trick question; you're already an animal.

If our subconscious was attractive, we wouldn't have to bury it down deep within us.

If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

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.

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

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.

Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive.

Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without.

I'm a pretty good drawer. I have trouble painting because you literally have to wait for the paint to dry. I'm disciplined, but I'm not patient.

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

You're smarter than TV. So what?

Purchased experiences don't count.

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.

In our heads we're all about 33 years old.

I go to the gym three days a week. You have to or else - I don't want to be the guy that dies shoveling snow.

When I look at my daily schedule, I feel like a trout flopping about on a dock, drowning in the air. Some people are ruthless with their schedules. Not me. I wing it.

Men won't read any email from a woman that's over 200 words long.

For many people, myself included, the end of the world is happening all the time! It is a form of criticality that paradoxically gives us hope for change and improvement.

High school is such a shared experience in North American culture.

Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.

We're rapidly approaching a world comprised entirely of jail and shopping.

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

A ring is a halo on your finger.

Technology favors horrible people.

The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.

If your life had lyrics, would they be any good?

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

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.

When you think about Twitter and you think what a dumb stupid throwaway technology, and then you have the Iranian elections and it actually saves the day - you can't prejudge technologies now because they have effects you may not have intended.

I'm always looking for things that are so incredibly present that they become invisible.

Florida isn't so much a place where one goes to reinvent oneself, as it is a place where one goes if one no longer wished to be found.

I think the killers get far too much attention.

Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler.

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

If someone decides to be a musician now, it means because there is no hope of money at the end of it, it means they really want to be a musician. And if someone is writing now, there is no hope for money at the end of it.

In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.

Where does personality end and brain damage begin?