21 Douglas Coupland Quotes on Life

Douglas Coupland quotes on life

5. ... 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 moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet ?

6. 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.

8. 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 thogught 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.

10. Meeting Anna-Louise was like finding a stranger's shopping list on the mall flooor and realising there are other, more interesting diets than your own. It was the first time I ever felt incomplete.

14. 'We call Jasmine's room 'The Harem,' a sexy place, about which Dan never complained, even though his own possessions, his laptop PC and briefcase, for example, looked crazy in the environment, invasive and overcomplex, like Stealth bombers in SmurfWorld.'

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

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

31. 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.

34. 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.

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

36. Is feeling nothing the inevitable result of believing in nothing? ...I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything.

44. I used to always think I had to have a reason to record my observations of the day, or even my emotions, but now I think simply being alive is more than enough reason.

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

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

53. 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.

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

56. Scrape. Feel. Dig. Believe. Ask.

57. Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs.

58. 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.

76. Comics day came and went. Another shoes day came and went. And another comics day followed that - the typical production and consumption cycles that help us survice our dismal, meaningless little lives.

82. It can be really fun to go down with the ship.