Douglas Coupland Quotes

Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media might do us all such tremendous favours when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much as the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Syracuse University commencement address, May 8, 1994 [Source of the book's title]

When you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you. It's called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don't. Here is a list of the symptoms, and don't worry - loneliness is the most universal sensation on the planet. Just remember one fact - loneliness will pass. You will survive and you will be a better human for it.

People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity. (from inside the cover)

What do lesbians have against capitalized letters?
"Capitalization implies a hierarchy, that some letters are more special than others."

Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words.

Her friends have become who they've become by default. Their dreams are forgotten, or were never formulated to begin with.

Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.

I thought that intimacy with another soul was the closest I could ever come to leaving my body.

It turns out 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. I can’t imagine anything worse than that. Okay, maybe I can, but imagine reading the morning newspaper and believing it all to be true on some level.

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

You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.

Hang on a second—you already have my old laptop. Why do you want my new drives so badly?
"Because my contract says I have to write a book, and it's much easier just to steal your life than to make something up."

Nobody has ever been happy in a job they obtained by first handing in a resumé.

You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about yourself.

You wilfully ignore the small, gentle observations in life which you know are the most important.