Douglas Coupland

The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything.

— Douglas Coupland

I wonder that all things seem to be from hell these days: dates, jobs, parties, weather .... Could the situation be that we no long 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.

— Douglas Coupland

You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.

— Douglas Coupland

Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes.

— Douglas Coupland

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

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

— Douglas Coupland

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

I don't want dainty little moments of insight …

— Douglas Coupland

McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.

— Douglas Coupland

Poverty Jet Set: A group of people given to chronic travelling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permenant residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone call relationships with people named Serge or Ilyana. Tend to discuss frequent flyer programs at parties.

— Douglas Coupland

Historical Underdosing: To living a period of time when nothing seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

— Douglas Coupland

Historical Overdosing: to live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

— Douglas Coupland

Historical Slumming: The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural village -- locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back -- so as to experience relief when one returns back to “the present.”

— Douglas Coupland

I began doing writing projects and art and design projects to explore a new way of seeing Canada. Roots is one more way of continuing this exploration. I want to present a wide-open Canadian sense of color, adventure, communication and openness that defines our country.

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— 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.

— Douglas Coupland

Decade Blending: In clothing: the indiscriminate combination of two or more items from various decades to create a personal mood: Sheila Mary Quant earrings (1960s) + cork wedgie platform shoes (1970s) + black leather jacket (1950s and 1980s).

— Douglas Coupland

Veal-Fattening Pen: Small, cramped office workstations built of fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions and inhabited by junior staff members. Named after the small preslaughter cubicles used by the cattle industry.

— Douglas Coupland

Emotional Ketchup Burst: The bottling up of opinions and emotions inside onself so that they explosively burst forth all at once, shocking and confusing employers and friends -- most of whom thought things were fine.

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

Clique Maintenance: The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: Kids today do nothing. They’re so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain.

— Douglas Coupland

Consensus Terrorism: The process that decides in-office attitudes and behavior.

— Douglas Coupland

Forget about being world famous, it's hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.

— Douglas Coupland

Grandpa, like most of the fun-loving gang who built the Plants, just wanted to die or have his brain turn to oatmeal before it becomes too apparent exactly what a nightmare he and his buddies have saddled their descendants with.

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

'Is the hotel Marge? It has to be Marge. I want atmosphere.' Marge is Anna-Louise's word describing sad, 1950s-ish diner-type places where the waitresses are named Marge.

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

When you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you. It's called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don't. Here is a list of the symptoms, and don't worry - loneliness is the most universal sensation on the planet. Just remember one fact - loneliness will pass. You will survive and you will be a better human for it.

— Douglas Coupland

I have this feeling watching Jasmine - that 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.

— Douglas Coupland

And the reason Luke is thinking about time and free will is because he believes that money is the closest human beings have ever come to crystallizing time and free will into a compact physical form. Cash. Cash is a time crystal. Cash allows you to multiply your will, and it allows you to speed up time. Cash is what defines us as a species. Nothing else in the universe has money.

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

I tell you what: I give you all of my strength - I seal it inside a little green envelope and mail it to you with hope and peace and much much love. Take all you need and take it quickly.

— Douglas Coupland

Your inability to achieve solitude makes you settle for substandard relationships.

— Douglas Coupland

You don't believe magic is possible in lives lived within traditional boundaries.

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog.

— Douglas Coupland

Christmas makes everything twice as sad.

— Douglas Coupland

You still don't know what you do well.

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

Your refusal to acknowledge the dark side of humanity makes you prey to that dark side.

— Douglas Coupland

You worry that if you lower your guard, even for one second, your whole world will disintegrate into chaos.

— Douglas Coupland

You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about yourself.

— Douglas Coupland

I mean five thousand years ago people emerge out of nowhere -- sproing!-- with brains and everything and begin wrecking the planet. You'd think we'd give the issue a little more thought than we do.

— Douglas Coupland

Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures... And I think back over my life and I realize that my own nature -the core me- essentially hasn't changed over 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 the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.

— Douglas Coupland

We can no longer create the feeling of an era...of time being particular to one spot in time.

— Douglas Coupland

Chronocanine Envy:

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

Technology does not always equal progress.

— Douglas Coupland

I thought that intimacy with another soul was the closest I could ever come to leaving my body.

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

...I realized that once people are broken in certain ways they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one.

— 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.

— Douglas Coupland

I'm trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition.

— Douglas Coupland

What is the one thing more than any other thing that makes one person different from any other person?

— Douglas Coupland

...when you're in love, all of your doors are open, and all of their doors are open. And you roller-skate down your halls together.

— Douglas Coupland

The two of you start talking about your feelings and your feelings float outside of you like vapors, and they mix together like a fog. Before you realize it, the two of you have become the same mist and you realize you can never return to being just a lone cloud again, because the isolation would be intolerable.

— Douglas Coupland

I told Ethan that I speak in an unrestricted manner to animals -- things like, aren't you just the cutest little kitty... that kind of thing, which I wouldn't dream of doing to humans. Then I realized I wish I could.

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

Language is such a technology.

— Douglas Coupland

We are at the vanguard of adolescent protraction.

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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?

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs.

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

If you want to get close to somebody, you have to tell him or her something intimate about yourself. They'll tell you something intimate in return, and if you keep this going, maybe you'll end up in love.

— Douglas Coupland

People like that woman make it clear just how asinine it is to believe that human beings have some kind of in-built universal sense of goodness. These days I think that everybody's just one spit away from being a mall bomber.

— Douglas Coupland

Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words.

— Douglas Coupland

I was Cheryl Anway- that has to count for something.

— Douglas Coupland

What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.

— Douglas Coupland

I hear that God has a really bad haircut.

— Douglas Coupland

The heart of a man is like deep water.

— Douglas Coupland

People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity. (from inside the cover)

— Douglas Coupland

The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I’m kidding. But killing helps.

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

Nobody has ever been happy in a job they obtained by first handing in a resumé.

— Douglas Coupland

If you’re an incredibly famous rich person who does more in one day than I do in a month, does your perception of time’s passing go slower or faster than it does for me?

— Douglas Coupland

“I have this theory about smart people. If you’re smart, you’re either the only person in your family who’s smart, or everybody in the family is smart. No in-between.”I considered this. “I think I come from the everybody’s smart category. But they don’t apply their smarts to… larger picture pursuits. That includes me.”

— Douglas Coupland

“To be merely good enough is to never succeed.”

— Douglas Coupland

Flying dreams mean that you're doing the right thing with your life.

— Douglas Coupland

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?

— Douglas Coupland

I have an idea. … If Ethan and Mark are so similar, we might as well arbitrarily assign them distinct personality traits. I know—Mark, from here on, you're to be called 'Evil Mark.'

— Douglas Coupland

Just go and feed yourselves on a wide array of products containing high-fructose corn sugar. Zheesh.""That wasn't funny, Evil Mark. It sounded fake and hollow. You're terrible at being ironic, and you've been rehearsing that line, haven't you?

— Douglas Coupland

As he ages and sees more of the world, he’s realizing that bad news is a part of life, and that when you have to give it, just say it and get it over with.

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

Ethan is annoyed with all of these dumb campaigns that indoctrinate millions of people into thinking they’re tough-guy free spirits when, in fact, there’s probably much to be said for following and, in any event, the food chain isn’t structured to encompass millions of non-followers.

— Douglas Coupland

If you can control your emotions, chances are you don’t have too many.

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

Here’s my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can’t fake are erections, competence and creativity. That’s why meetings become toxic — they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be. And the more effort they put into concealing their inabilities, the more toxic the meeting becomes.

— Douglas Coupland

“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.”

— Douglas Coupland

“Why are we drinking Zima? It’s beyond irony. It’s not funny or anything. It’s just gross. Why not just serve us jugs of Hitler’s piss instead?”“It’d be a device that would allow him to locate the characters in time and a specific sort of culture.”

— Douglas Coupland

“A girl can’t control who will and who won’t fall in love with her, Ethan. And sometimes, when a nuisance person falls in love with you, it can be awfully… awkward.”

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

“I wish my parents took good care of their grow-op.”

— Douglas Coupland

The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we’ve started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.

— Douglas Coupland

It turns out 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. I can’t imagine anything worse than that. Okay, maybe I can, but imagine reading the morning newspaper and believing it all to be true on some level.

— Douglas Coupland

You're never too old to dance, Dad...and you're never too old to dream.""That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard you say. Were you saying that with irony or for real?

— Douglas Coupland

“What do lesbians have against capitalized letters?”“Capitalization implies a hierarchy, that some letters are more special than others.”

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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.

— Douglas Coupland

I was wondering what electrons are actually doing when they sit in your hard drive in an old laptop at the back of your closet. I mean, how does an electron sit still — is it like a cartoon M&M learning back in a folding beach chair? Is it like an angry little steel ball bearing hovering there, just waiting to go nuts on protons? What’s the mechanism that starts and stops the electron? Who’s its dungeon master?

— Douglas Coupland

Hang on a second—you already have my old laptop. Why do you want my new drives so badly?""Because my contract says I have to write a book, and it's much easier just to steal your life than to make something up.

— Douglas Coupland

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]

— Douglas Coupland

Fame without the money to insulate you from it is one of the most wretched human conditions possible. (p. 80)

— Douglas Coupland

The hardest things in the world are being unique and having your life be a story. In the old days, it was much easier, but our modern fame-driven culture, with its real-time 24-7 marinade of electronic information, demands a lot from modern citizens, and poses great obstacles to narrative.

— Douglas Coupland

Truly modern citizens are both charismatic and can only respond to other people with charisma. To survive, people need to become self-branding charisma robots. Yet, ironically, society mocks and punishes people who aspire to that state.

— Douglas Coupland

There was a fifteen-second patch of silence, then Craig said, 'Isn't it weird that Hotmail accounts still exist?' 'It really is,' said Bev. (p. 222)

— Douglas Coupland

Finally, my life was a story. My days would no longer feel like a video game that resets to zero every time I wake up, and then begs for coins. (p. 143)

— Douglas Coupland

Being alive is just a brief technicality. (p. 167)

— Douglas Coupland

Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives? How hard can it be to change gears and say, "You know what? Instead of inventing and telling stories, I’m going to make my life a more interesting story." (p. 177)

— Douglas Coupland

Doug's Law: "You can have information or you can have a life, but you can't have both."

— Douglas Coupland

We have to count. I want to be part of history. I want a Wikipedia page. I want Google hits. I don’t want to be just a living organism that comes and goes and leaves no trace on this planet.

— Douglas Coupland

Unlike Rachel, Player One has a complete overview both of the world and of time. Player One’s life is more like a painting than it is a story. Player One can see everything with a glance and can change tenses at will. Player One has ultimate freedom, the ultimate software on the ultimate hardware. That realm is also the one place where Player One feels, for lack of a better word, normal.

— Douglas Coupland

Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a series of events — a story — and when we can’t figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow.

— Douglas Coupland

Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.

— Douglas Coupland

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

— Douglas Coupland

Men won't read any email from a woman that's over 200 words long.

— Douglas Coupland

I think that to acknowledge a new generation is to acknowledge some degree of obsolescence in yourself, and that is very hard to do and often comes with undeniable anger.

— Douglas Coupland

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

— Douglas Coupland

Dimanchophobia:

— Douglas Coupland

I began doing writing projects and art and design projects to explore a new way of seeing Canada. Roots is one more way of continuing this exploration. I want to present a wide-open Canadian sense of color, adventure, communication and openness that defines our country.

— Douglas Coupland

Is that all time is - our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass?

— Douglas Coupland

Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.

— Douglas Coupland

Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.

— Douglas Coupland

Chronotropic Drugs:

— Douglas Coupland

You should be spreading the good word. You should be etching the good word onto the glass scanning beds of library photocopiers. You should be scraping the truth onto old auto parts and throwing them off bridges so that people digging in the mud in a million years will question the world, too. You should be carving eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe soles so that your every trail speaks of thinking and faith and belief. You should be designing molecules that crystallize into poems of devotion. You should be making bar codes that print out truth, not lies. You shouldn't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has the truth stamped on it--a demand for people to reach a finer place!

— Douglas Coupland

We were never supposed to live until 40. We were built to self-destruct at 30, whether from cancer or mental illness. We're all going way beyond our expiration date.

— Douglas Coupland

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

— Douglas Coupland

We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.

— Douglas Coupland

Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you.

— Douglas Coupland

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

— Douglas Coupland