Quotes from Douglas Coupland

As far as I can see, Janet, life is just an endless banquet of loss, and each time a new loss is doled out, you have to move your mental furniture around, throw things out, and by then there's more loss, and the cycle goes on and on. (All Families are Psychotic.)

He said, A ring is a halo for your finger. From now on, we no longer cast two shadows, we cast one.

God, I wish he and I had been genuinely close as opposed to the Don't-they-look-nice-together-in-the-airbrushed-family-portrait close.

When I was younger I used to worry so much about being alone—of being unlovable or incapable of love. As the years went on, my worries changed. I worried that I had become incapable of having a relationship, of offering intimacy. I felt as though the world lived inside a warm house at night and I was outside, and I couldn't be seen—because I was out there in the night. But now I am inside that house and it feels just the same.

We then return our gaze to the mirror-boxed future-towns circling us-the hard drives of our culture, where the human tribe is making flesh its deepest needs and fears; teaching machines to think; accelerating the pace of obsolescence; designing new animals to replace the animals we've erased; value adding; reconstructing the future.

Because in the end we forget everything, anyway. We're human; we're amnesia machines.

Jason's father, Reg, always said Love what God loves and hate what God hates, but more often than not I had the impression that he really meant Love what Reg loves and hate what Reg hates.

Hi! I'm Ethan, I shop at Ikea. I bought a $300 dining suite and it took me three days to assemble!

Those were big years, big times.

But Dag, for all of his efforts, might as well have been talking to a cat. Our parents' generation seems neither able nor interested in understanding how marketers exploit them. They take shopping at face value.

When you get an e-mail and reply to the sender, you simply obliterate everything they sent you and then, in small square brackets, write: [deletia] It stands for everything that's been lost.

Collecting and hoarding seem to be about the loss of others, while philanthropy and de-accessioning are more about the impending loss of self. (Whoever dies with the most toys actually loses.)

The sixties are like a theme park to them. They wear the costume, buy their tickets, and they have the experience.

Personality is a slot machine, and the cherries, lemons, and bells are your SSRI system, your schizophrenic tendency, your left/right brain lobalization, your anxiety proclivity, your wiring glitches, your place on the autistic and OCD spectrums - and to these we must add the deep-level influences of the machines and systems of intelligence that guided your brain into maturity.

I think that emotions affect you as much as x-rays and vitamins and car crashes.

I 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.

Nerds get what they want when they want it, and they go psycho if it's not immediately available. Nerds overfocus. I guess that's the problem. But it's precisely this ability to narrow-focus that makes them so good at code writing...

Sólo el individuo que vive en soledad es una criatura sujeta a leyes profundas y si sale al empezar la mañana, o mira hacia la tarde que está vibrante de vida y comprende lo que le rodea, entonces todo se desprende de él, como si de un cadáver se tratara, aunque siga en la plenitud de la vida.

It's amazing how you can be a total shithead, and yet your soul still wants to hang out with you.

In the spirit of Ethan's neurosis, we made a drywall list of keyboard buttons we would like to see: PLEASE, THANK YOU, FUCK OFF, DIE, OOPS...MY MISTAKE, DO SOMETHING COOL AND SURPRISE ME .

I'll pour Dr?no on your grave, you sick bastard.

The less of a life, the more mail you need

It hit him that his own form of loneliness was a luxury, one as chosen and as paid for as three weeks in Kenya's velds or a cherry red Ferrari. Real loneliness wasn't something an assistant scoped out and got a good price on. Real loneliness was smothering and it stank of hopelessness.

How cruel that mankind was forced to conform to the global electronic experience. But all other options had vanished. There no longer existed a country to escape to ("country"—also, what a quaint notion) where people read books and had lives that became stories.