Douglas Coupland Quotes

If you're not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world - if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order - then you're wasting your day.

Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs.

Scrape. Feel. Dig. Believe. Ask.

We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age.

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

There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now.

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

There's nothing at the center of what we do.

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.

At twenty you know you're not going to be a rock star... by twenty-five you know you're not going to be a dentist or a professional... by thirty, a darkness starts moving in - you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful... by thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing the rest of your life; you become resigned to your fate.

We had all awakened X number of years past our youth feeling sleazy and harsh. Choices still existed, but they were no longer infinite. Fun had become a scrim, concealing the hysteria that lay behind it.

At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?

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

We are at the vanguard of adolescent protraction.

Language is such a technology.