Top 539 Quotes & Sayings by Douglas Coupland - Page 9

Our conversations are never easy, but as I-we-get older, we are finding that our conversations must bespoken. A need burns inside us to share with others what we are feeling Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic. It is as though the coolness that marked out youth is itself a type of retrovirus that can only leave you feeling empty. Full of holes.

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.

Sometimes I think God is like weather - you may not like the weather, but it has nothing to do with you. You just happen to be there. Deal with it. Sadness and grief are part of being human and always will be.

Los Angelenos dress like they've been focus-grouped.

The heart of a man is like deep water

STRANGELOVE REPRODUCTION: Having children to make up for the fact that one no longer believes in the future.

Shopping is Not Creating.

ETHNOMAGNETISM: The tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods: 'You wouldn't understand it there, mother - they hug where I live now.'

Mom said that people are interested in birds only in as much as they exhibit human behavior - greed and stupidity and anger - and by doing so they free us from the unique sorrow of being human...I told Mom my own theory of why we like birds - of how birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

Beware of the corporate invasion of private memory.

PERSONALITY TITHE: A price paid for becoming a couple; previously amusing human beings become boring: 'Thanks for inviting us, but Noreen and I are going to look at flatware catalogs tonight. Afterward we're going to watch the shopping channel.

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.

Marketing is essentially about feeding the poop back to diners fast enough to make them think they're still getting real food.

There are few, if any, Canadian men that have never spelled their name in a snow bank.

Chronotropic Drugs:Drugs engineered to affect one's sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect.

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.

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

It's never felt more Canadian to be Canadian than it does now.

All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.

All systems have failed me. In five minutes I'll be fine again for a while, but right now the inside of my head feels like Niagara Falls without the noise, just this mist and churning and no real sense of where earth ends and heaven begins.

HISTORICALOVERDOSING:To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen.

Death without the possibility of ever changing the world is the same as a life that never was.

The new world lies before her eyes like an opened chest of treasure, a flock of birds over Africa, a thousand TVs all playing at once.

Time erases both the best and the worst of us.

You really have to wonder why we even bother to get up in the morning. I mean, really: Why work? Simply to buy more stuff? That's just not enough. Look at us all. What's the common assumption that got us all from there to here? What makes us deserve the ice cream and running shoes and wool Italian suits we have? I mean, I see all of us trying so hard to acquire so much stuff, but I can't help but feeling that we didn't merit it.

You're right, a spleen is a strange thing-we technically don't need one, but maybe spleens are kept in our bodies in case we mutate or evolve, and if we grow wings or tentacles we need to have the spleen in place in order for them to work.

Most people can't handle a structureless life.

And in your new lives you'll have to live entirely for that one sensation-that of imminent truth. And you're going to have to holler for it, steal for it, beg for it-and you're never to stop asking questions about it twenty-four hours a day, the rest of your life.

Everyone has a special place they store their tension (I'm on shiatsu duty), the same way everyone misspells the same words over and over. Karla stores her tension in her rhomboid muscles, and I remove it. This is making me feel good. That I can do this.

The Vienna Franks are a good example of urban white acid folk revivalism crossed with ska.

You really have to wonder why we even bother to get up in the morning. I mean, really: Why work? Simply to buy more stuff?

She went crazy with a calm face, justifiably so.

What is prayer but a wish for the events in your life to string together to form a story -- something that makes some sense of events you know have meaning.

You can't fake competence, creativity, or sexual arousal.

When you see such photos, you can't help but wonder at just how sweet and sad and innocent all moments of life are rendered by the tripping of a camera's shutter, for at that point the future is still unknown and has yet to hurt us, and also for that brief moment, our poses are accepted as honest.

Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers!

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

My brain feels like a cool, deep lake.

This was not a good idea coming home for Christmas. I'm too old. Years ago, coming back from schools or trips, I always expected some sort of new perspective or fresh insight about the family on returning. That doesn't happen anymore-the days of revelation about my parents, at least, are over... its time to move on. I think we'd all appreciate that.

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.

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.

NOSTALGIA IS A WEAPON

I really do force myself to not be fully engaged with all the technology at once, just because I have an addictive personality and I get too into it.

It's just amazing how hard it is for people to change, even when amazing things happen. It almost reinforces who you are instead of making you change.

I think writing would have happened to me anyway, somehow. Differently, but it still would have happened.

Ski boots are the worst. Solid plastic. They'll be around till the sun goes supernova.

I think individual people are interesting, not really groups of people.

I build my life so that I don't wake up for anything. Ever. If you make me get up early to do something with you, I will hate you and resent you and figure out a way of never having to work with you ever again.

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.

So much information lacks a good way to store it, especially when it's all digital; sometimes it requires old technology to go back and retrieve it.

I find people who prejudge reality TV to be annoying. Art comes from anywhere. Culture can ooze out of any crack. Prejudging is the death of creativity.

I think, there are people for whom freedom is a bigger, more important thing than stability.

I want to see books taken out of historical time and placed into a different timeline, such as evolutionary or geological time, as a means of putting the human experience in context.

I like having a beard. My beard changes my face shape and allows me to see in it family members who I love and can't see otherwise.

CONSENSUS TERRORISM:The process that decides in- office attitudes and behavior.

TV is all about hair. And then skin. And then clothing. And then it's about your voice. And finally the report, what you're actually saying. And 99 times out of 100, it never gets past the hair.

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

The more you want something to happen, the harder it becomes.

Discussions of generations only go downhill. There's no point in having them.