Douglas Coupland Quotes

I think about how I think I know a person then 'poof!' I discover I only knew a cartoon version. Suddenly there's this fleshy, demanding, noisy creature in front of me, unknowable and just as lost as I am, and equally unable to remember that every soul in the world is hurting, not just themselves.

You have to admit, half the people who work here are mildly autistic; poor social skills, the ability to obsess on anything numerical or repetitive, the odd outfits, the paranoia and the sense of continually being judged and measured.

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

I don't want dainty little moments of insight …

We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there's a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thought we'd have a bowel movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better.

A thousand years ago this wouldn’t have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids stand. One hundred years ago—or even fifty years ago—the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. The only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That’s why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It’s because Earth is now totally ours.

I realized a capacity for not feeling lonely carried a very real price, which was the threat of feeling nothing at all.

When you're young you always feel that life hasn't yet begun...But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive.

Don’t you get an empty feeling in your soul when you have a blank to-do list?

Let's go out and buy a statistically average meal from a large multinational restaurant chain. That usually fixes about seventy-five percent of life's problems.

Chances are you feel superior to almost everyone you work with — however, they probably feel the same way about you.

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.

TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.

Only damaged people want good things to happen to them through visualization. They want something for nothing.

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