Quotes from Douglas Coupland

I once read that for every person currently alive on earth, there are nineteen dead people who have lived before us. That's not that much really. Our existence as a species on earth has been so short. We forget that.

The store is also lit to the point of painfulness by a ceiling loaded with more fluorescent bulbs than a landing mothership. Shielding my headachey eyes, I make my consumer choices, then head to the counter, where the clerk is wearing sunglasses. I pay the clerk with a five-dollar bill on which I have felt-penned the words: I AM AFRAID OF THE DARK AGES.

These were citizens who, never having bothered to awaken to the technological and psychic changes in their world, hadn't bothered to defend themselves, hadn't bothered to build walls or plan counterattacks or build weapons-- asleep inside their collective dream, thinking for all the world that the unthinkable would never happen. Thinking they were safe.

we lost money at church bingos and ate catfish deep-fried in lard.

Microserfs (1995) p28 'He's thinking of quitting [Microsoft] to be a pixelation broker, going around to museums to digitize their paintings

It's what makes us different from every other creature in the world - we have time. And we have choices

It starts out young - you try not to be different just to survive - you try to be just like everyone else - anonymity becomes reflexive - and then one day you wake up and you've *become* all those other people - the others - the something you aren't. And you wonder if you can ever be what you really *are*. Or you wonder if it's too late to find out.

Personne n'est émotionnellement vide.

Marshall alone his room with a comically tall stack of books, methodically absorbing their contents as though they were drugs...

In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul; polluted waters mean a sickened soul. Water is the basis of our self-identity, and when we dream of canoes and thunderstorms and streams and even snowballs, we're dreaming about our innermost selves.

Always keep your mouth shut with a drunk. You can never win with piss tanks. The most you can hope for is to break even.

the universe is indeed a beautiful place. If you doubt me, go check for yourself.

One psycho for every nine stable people in the company is a good ratio.

I'd change you bandages for you, but you don't have any and that's a big issue here.

and it was like the universe had suddenly turned itself off and the world was almost holy, like life was suddenly religious, but good religious, and suddenly everyone became the best version of themselves.

Sometimes we all forget that the world itself is paradise, and there has been much of late to enourage that amnesia. (Microserfs, p 366)

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.

I'm going to see Princess Mononoke tonight at the Ridge — and you're coming with me.

But that's what family members are for. We crave them and need them not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about but because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.

A rich man is always simply a rich man, but a rich woman is only a poor woman who just happens to have money.

Six silent people in a room got me to thinking about the voice we hear in our heads when we read, the universal narrator's voice you may well be hearing right now. Whose voice *is* it you're hearing? It's not your own, is it? I didn't think so. It never is. So I posed the question out loud..." ...When you read a book, whose voice is it you hear inside your head? It's certainly not my own, said Harj, and the others chimed in with the same claim. Then whose it?

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

What I notice is that everybody's kind of accusing everybody else of actingthese days. Know what I mean? Kind of, uh, not being genuine. 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.

Some day you cross this thin line and you really realize that we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.