Quotes from Douglas Coupland

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 or counterattacks or build weapons-- asleep inside their collective dream, thinking for all the world that the unthinkable would never happen. Thinking they were safe.

Anyway, it's a good thing we're human. We design business spreadsheets, paint programs, and word processing equipment. So that tells you where we're at as a species. What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?

Remember: Condoms promote licentiousness, so reconsider before using.

Speaking of the information superhighway, we have all given each other official permission to administer a beating to whoever uses that accursed term. We're so sick of it!

it would have been an affront to all good souls who had worked for a better world over the millennia not to engineer a system for preserving finer thoughts after the millennium arrived and all ideologies died and people became animals once more.

Steven Spielberg once said, which is that people will sit through twenty minutes of anything.

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.

Life is a bowl of chainsaws.

You could return to that same hive a thousand years later and there would be just the same perception of tomorrow as never being any different. Humans are completely different. We assume tomorrow is another world.

1959* 100th McDonald's: Fon du Lac, Wisconsin

Actually, it's not the impertinence I'm punishing him for, it's that he let other people know what he wanted.

Nostalgia for the 20th century brain helps nobody.

Most people don't learn things along the way. Or if they do, they conveniently forget those things when it suits their need. Most people, given a second chance, fuck it up completely. It's one of those laws of the universe that you can't shake. People, I have noticed, only seem to learn once they get their third chance—after losing and wasting vast sums of time, money, youth, and energy—you name it. But still they learn, which is the better thing in the end.

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?

I think we live in this world, but we don't change the world.

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.

The whole world seems to be working too hard.

I am now [email protected]. @ could become the Mc or Mac of the next millennium.

I don't think human beings were meant to know so much about the world. All this time and all this exposure to every conceivable aspect of life—wisdom so rarely enters the picture. We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age.

And if you were such a good clairvoyant, why didn't you just write things straight out? What's with all the stupid rhyming quatrains? Thanks for nothing.

What about life after death? What about death after life after death?

The thing about Jason Bourne is that he only really shines when he's being chased. Without the forces of evil pursuing him, Jason Bourne is basically council house trash living on KFC and the proceeds of his illegal Polish and Romanian girlfriends who'll toss you off for a tenner at the local lottery ticket kiosk.

Total Quality Management

Karla like myself is of the new apolitical pick-and-choose style of citizen. I think politics is soon going to resemble a J. Crew catalogue more than some 1776 ideal. If somebody wants to run for office, they had better be able to explain why they want to run for office. Wanting to be a candidate seems, in itself, reason for exclusion.