Quotes from Douglas Coupland

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.

In my mind, I've always checked out in 2037; that's always been my expiration date. I'll be 75.

Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.

Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.

The future and eternity are two entirely different things.

Fashion only seems to make sense if it's rooted in some dimension of history or if it feels like a continuation of an idea.

Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you.

Adventure without risk is Disneyland.

You can't fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.

Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you.

Good-looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters.

I don't like telephones: I don't like when they ring. Just because it rings, you have to pick it up. I don't even like opening mail; I'm weird.

When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.

If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.

And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.

When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun—that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.

I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.

The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be healing—a blanket—the comfort of a friend. Without at least some rain in any given day, or at least a cloud or two on the horizon, I feel overwhelmed by the information of sunlight and yearn for the vital, muffling gift of falling water.

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.

I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.

I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.