Quotes from Douglas Coupland

If nothing else, we simply get used to being alive.

Now Karen wants a pill that will make the whole twenty-first century disappear - that will make this unavoidable future vanish. Dr Yamato said that earth was not built for six billion people, all running around and being passionate about being alive. Earth was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.

I wonder that all things seem to be from hell these days: dates, jobs, parties, weather…Could the situation be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised heaving in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can't help but suffer in comparison.

I thought I was going to see God or reach an epiphany or to levitate or something. But I never did. I prayed so long for that to happen. I think maybe I didn't surrender myself enough - I think that's the term: surrender. I still wanted to keep a foot in both worlds. And then this past year I've still been waiting for the same big cosmic moments, and still nothing's happened...

MID TWENTIES BREAKDOWN: A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.

I then return to my seat and something happens to me-- something inside me is exhausted and worn and stops spinning and I break down and cry. I cry because the future has once again found its sparkle and grown a million times larger. And I cry because... of how badly I behaved during my own personal Dark Ages-- back before I had a future and someone who cared for me from above. It is like today the sky opened up and only now am I allowed to enter.

I imagine I sow cuttings of Anna-Louise's hair, like the fine stems of dried flowers, and watch sunflowers grow from the cuttings. I imagine I bury a pocket calculator with liquid crystals spelling her name, then watch the earth shoot forth lightning bolts. 'We should open up a seafood house together,' Anna-Louise says when she wants to torture me. Now that's love.

Abe: Wise hermit cast adrift on asteroid for thousands of years; has developed odd code languages for everyday actions; lonely but not bitter; his heart is cryogenically frozen, and he must search the universe pursuing the Thawer.

and after those big strokes, what's to tell? We run out of things that make us individual very quickly; all of us have far more in common than we do not have in common.

It is with these thoughts in mind that I now see the drifter's windburned face when I now consider my world-his face that reminds that there is still something left to believe in after there is nothing left to believe. A face for people like me-who were pushed to the edge of loneliness and who maybe fell off and who when we climbed back on, our world never looked the same

Lonely people want to be dead, yet we're still not quite ready to go—we don't want to miss the action; we want to see who wins next year's Academy Awards.

This was unexpected, my soul's connection to you. You stole my loneliness. No one knows that I was wishing for you, a thief, to enter my house of autonomy, that I had locked my doors but my windows were open, hoping, but not believing, you would enter.

I don't remember where I was before I was born, why should I be worried about where I go after I die?

Look, Neal, Hawaii is not some magical pixie wonderland; it's an American state populated by atomic weapons, a remnant native population and people too stupid to spell their way out of a paper bag. Most of them came here to escape pathetic lives in the forty nine other states, so in some sense, Hawaii is a scenic cul-de-sac filled with people who want to drink themselves to death without feeling judged.

And for a while they were happy in their own manner; they had the animal confidence money affords.

Keep your treasure to yourself.

And so the point of this story is that when I first met you at the photocopy machine, sure, we talked like a telethon and everything, but the perfume you were wearing then—that perfume was the smell of my stamp album, the smell of countries I always wanted to visit but never thought I'd be able to. It was like you had the world inside you.

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.

Which is that there's too much weight improperly distributed: towers and elevators; steel, stone and cement. So much mass up so high that gravity itself could end up being warped--

To acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition.

I am reminded that no matter how hard you try, you can never be more than twelve years old with your parents.

Mphhh... What did you say Tyler?' Anna-Louise mumbles on the bed above me. I stand up, and a tame blue bird lands on my shoulder and tries to nibble my earlobe. I gently shake Anna-Louise fully awake. 'Anna-Louise, wake-up,' I say. 'Wake up--the world is alive.

Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style- everyone's too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the '90s.

Do you realize, Tyler,' says Anna-Louise, 'the entire time we were in the forest it rained steadily and not once did we approach a state of moistness? There was a storm and we didn't even know.