Best 374 quotes of Douglas Coupland on MyQuotes

Douglas Coupland

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    Douglas Coupland

    A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Adventure without risk is Disneyland.

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    Douglas Coupland

    A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal.

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    Douglas Coupland

    A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age - regardless of how they look on the outside - pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.

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    Douglas Coupland

    After my brush with the suicidal impulse, I listen with new ears to others when they speak on the subject. I think there are people who were born with that little door open, and they have to go through life knowing that they might jump through it at any moment.

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    Douglas Coupland

    After you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of Earth? What one moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet? What's your takeaway? Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive.

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    Douglas Coupland

    A good piece of technology dreams of the day when it will be replaced by a newer piece of technology. This is one definition of progress.

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    Douglas Coupland

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

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    Douglas Coupland

    All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.

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    Douglas Coupland

    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.

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    Douglas Coupland

    A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.

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    Douglas Coupland

    And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.

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    Douglas Coupland

    And in his heart, I think, he's now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I've said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world.

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    Douglas Coupland

    And I think back over my own life and I realize that my own nature-the core me-essentially hasn’t changed all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel that same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.

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    Douglas Coupland

    And then sometimes I think the people to feel saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder – people who closed the doors that leads us into the secret world – or who had the doors closed for them by time and neglect and decisions made in times of weakness.

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    Douglas Coupland

    ...and when you meet someone and fall in love, and they fall in love with you, you ask them "Will you take my heart-- stains and all?" and they say "I will," and they ask you the same question and you say, "I will," too.

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    Douglas Coupland

    A ring is a halo on your finger.

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    Douglas Coupland

    As I'm never going to be old, I'm glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness.

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    Douglas Coupland

    As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.

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    Douglas Coupland

    As you grow older, it becomes harder to feel 100 percent happy; you learn all the things that can go wrong, you become superstitious about tempting fate, about bringing disaster upon your life by accidentally feeling too good one day.

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    Douglas Coupland

    At least there's nothing scary about him and hopefully he doesn't see anything scary in me. We go way back, to summer camp. We KNOW each other. People I don't know just make me want to say YIKES! I'll take history over mystery any day of the week.

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    Douglas Coupland

    At least when you're young you're also stupid.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Being asked what animal you'd like to be is a trick question; you're already an animal.

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    Douglas Coupland

    believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Besides, animals don’t even have time. Only humans have time. It’s what makes us different.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Beware of the corporate invasion of private memory.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be [email protected].

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    Douglas Coupland

    Brain research tells us 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.

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    Douglas Coupland

    BRAZILIFICATION:The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.

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    Douglas Coupland

    But I guess the nice thing about driving a car is that the physical act of driving itself occupies a good chunk of brain cells that otherwise would be giving you trouble overloading your thinking. New scenery continually erases what came before; memory is lost, shuffled, relabeled and forgotten. Gum is chewed; buttons are pushed; windows are lowered and opened. A fast moving car is the only place where you're legally allowed to not deal with your problems. It's enforced meditation and this is good.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Canadian winters are long. Life is hard and so is ice.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Capitalization implies a hierarchy, that some letters are more special than others.

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    Douglas Coupland

    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.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Clowns drink to blot out the ravages of terrifying children for a living.

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    Douglas Coupland

    Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me.

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    Douglas Coupland

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

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    Douglas Coupland

    Could the situation be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised Heaven in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can't help but suffer in comparison.

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    Douglas Coupland

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

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    Douglas Coupland

    Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one's taking.

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    Douglas Coupland

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

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    Douglas Coupland

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

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    Douglas Coupland

    Do you ever just want to take your car out onto the highway and gun the engine as fast as you can and then close your eyes and see what happens?