Quotes from Douglas Coupland

So where do you start when you want to start your life again?

Dreams don't come true. Dreams die. Dreams get compromised. Dreams end up dealing meth in a booth at the back of the Olive Garden. Dreams choke to death on bay leaves. Dreams get spleen cancer.

I am aware that there is a world out there that functions without regard to me. There are wars and budgets and bombings and vast dimensions of wealth and greed and ambition and corruption. And yet I don't feel a part of that world, and I wouldn't know how to join if I tried.

Everybody has a 'gripping stranger' in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it's the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library—a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying 'Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,' you'd follow them.

A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal.

Jason once told me that eye contact is the most intimacy two people can have -- forget sex -- because the optic nerve is technically an extension of the brain, and when two people look into each other's eyes, it's brain-to-brain.

Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you.

I thought about how odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no animal equivalent were smoking, body-building and writing. That's not much, considering how special we seem to think we are.

As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.

Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers!

Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me.

She went crazy with a calm face, justifiably so.

Question: If there were two of you which one would win?

I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I've realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.

Sometimes you can't realize you're in a bad mood until another person enters your orbit.

I saw doves and I thought they were rocks, but they were asleep. My breath made them stir, and they rocks took flight, the earth exploding... and my only thought was that I wanted you to see them, too.

If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you? It'll still be happening to an unchanged person.

Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now.

I would like to fall in love again but my only hope is that love doesn't happen to me so often after this. I don't want to get so used to falling in love that i get curious to experience something more extreme - whatever that may be.

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. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade.

You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.

Do you ever just want to take your car out onto the highway and gun the engine as fast as you can and then close your eyes and see what happens?

Only the disenfranchised can party with abandon.

A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age - regardless of how they look on the outside - pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.