Quotes from Douglas Coupland

He knew that the fuel his brain craved could only be found in a proper university.

The best thing about being young is being stupid. Or rather, the best thing about being young is being too stupid to know how stupid you really are.

I'm not cheerful or domestic. I'm drab, crabby and friendless. I fill my days fighting a constant battle to keep my dignity. Loneliness is my curse- our species' curse- it's the gun that shoots the bullets that make us dance on a saloon floor and humiliate ourselves in front of strangers.

innocent." Stupid, stupid woman, but a woman whose daughter was lost in the

I am by now completely convinced that my downfall in life is going to be my inability to achieve computer nirvana like a true hacker or hackette. I think this lacking is the most unmodern facet of my personality—the career equivalent of having six fingers, or a vestigial tail.

How many of us have a love so true it spans eternity? A purity of need so clear it can remain strong in the face of all that the world throws at us? This is Karen Ann McNeil, the woman who fell to Earth, the woman for whom the people in her life never gave up waiting.

Are you a minimalist? Do you take pride in a reductive life? Minimalists are actually extreme hoarders: they hoard space, and they're just as odd as those people with seven rooms filled with newspapers, dead cats and margarine tubs

I've always been interested in the unintended side effects of technology. For instance, when the car was invented, who would have thought dogs would like sticking their heads out the window to enjoy the scentscape generated by speed and wind?

Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long

And once again, work is providing us with a comforting sense of normalcy-living and working inside of coding's predictably segmented time/space. Simply grinding away at something makes life feel stable, even though the external particulars of life (like our pay checks, our office, and so forth) are, at best, random.

When you crop a photo, you tell a lie.

IT WAS AN ASTONISHINGLY forgettable day—a Tuesday?—one of those days that come and go, and then at the end of your life you wonder, Man, did I really piss away my life with an endless series of wasted Tuesdays?

Ray, don't get mad just because I say yes to life. I like to keep myself available to the universe, because it brings me wisdom. Maybe you don't just want me to soar.

and we had just invented the first of a set of what I would call fusion entities - characters, that could only exist when the two of us were together

Wade tried to imagine Florida before the advent of man, but couldn't. The landscape seemed too thoroughly colonized -- the trailers, factory outlets, and cocktail shacks of the world below. He decided that if human beings took over the moon, they'd probably just turn it into Florida.

We instinctively wave to people on trains because trains are a metaphor for being alive: countless souls, trapped together, hurtling across the landscape, with a destination somewhere in the unseeable distance. Nobody ever waves at buses.

HISTORICAL UNDERDOSING: To live in a period of time when nothing seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts. ¶ 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.

My brain is built of paths and slides and ladders and lasers and i have invited all of you to enter its pavilion. my brain, as you enter, will smell of tangerines and brand-new running shoes.

Today was the first day when I could really tell that summer was over. The cold air sparkled and the maple leaves were rotting, putting forth their lovely reek, like dead pancakes.

when future archeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of these gyms and all of this scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we are a culture obsessed with torture.

Fun fact: The United Nations building in New York City is the only place in all of North America where smoking is still permitted indoors.

I was convinced that all of the people I'd ever gone to school with were headed for great things in life and I wasn't. They were having more fun; finding more meaning in life.

The Fry's chain completely taps into MSE: Male Shopping Energy. This is to say that most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and once these calories are gone, they're gone for the day—if not the week—and can't be regenerated simply by having an Orange Julius at the Food Fair.

Claire put scientifically enhanced popcorn in the microwave oven. I never feel like I'm putting food in one of these things, she then says, entering with beeps, the time-set into the LED. It feels more like I'm inserting fuel rods into a core.