Douglas Coupland Quotes

I'm beginning to feel like a microwaved egg that will explode if anybody so much as breathes onto the surface.

The heart of a man is like deep water.

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

What's the point of being efficient if you're only leading an efficiently blank life?

Language is such a technology.

Technology does not always equal progress.

Boomer Envy: Envy of material wealth and long-range material security accrued by older members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate births.

Scrape. Feel. Dig. Believe. Ask.

Bleeding Ponytail: An elderly sold out baby boomer who pines for hippie or pre-sellout days.

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.

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]

Hip flasks are the juice machines of the alcohol world — everyone has one and it never gets used.

Preemptive boringness. Being one-dimensional is the most satisfying method of coping with out-of-control people - with any situation that's out of control … Don't let people know the ideas you love, the games you've played, the places you've visited in your mind. Keep your treasure to yourself.

Ethan, there has to be more to my life than this.
"Why can't you just be happy as a shallow cartoon glyph of a human like everybody else here?"

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.