Quotes from Douglas Coupland

Society indeed conspires to keep you ball and chained.

What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.

You know what the best thing is about the end of the day? Tomorrow, it starts all over again.

Once he entered my life, I promptly forgot all my years of putting on a brave face while browsing at bookstores until closing time, and of having one, two, three beers while watching crime shows and CNN. I completely forgot the hateful sensation of loneliness, like thirst and hunger together pressing on my stomach.

Imagine you're a forty-year-old, Richard, Hamilton said to me around this time, while working as a salesman at a Radio Shack in Lynn Valley,and suddenly somebody comes up to you saying, 'Hi, I'd like you to meet Kevin. Kevin is eighteen and will be making all of your career decisions for you.' I'd be flipped out. Wouldn't you? But that's what life is all about - some eighteen-year-old kid making your big decisions for you that stick for a lifetime. He shuddered.

You know, from what I've seen, at twenty you know you're not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you're not going to be a dentist or a professional. And by thirty, a darkness starts moving in - you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing the rest of your life; you become resigned to your fate.

The best part of my life is gone, and what remains is whizzing past so quickly I feel like I'm Krazy-Glue'ed onto a mechanical bull of a time machine.

For there was once a time when we expected the worst. But then the worst happened, did it not? And so we will never be surprised ever again.

You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.

My brain feels like a cool, deep lake.

You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.

I don't understand beauty.

Gore is nature's way of saying, There are too many human beings on the planet, and I'm trying to rectify this any way I can. SARS didn't work, but trust me, I'm cooking up something better. In the interim, please kill lots of yourselves.

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog.

This is not ambition. This is desperation.

I think there is a Paris inside us all.

We can no longer create the feeling of an era...of time being particular to one spot in time.

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.

Well, it's amazing what you can find in this world if you're willing to sleep with people.

Face it: You're always just a breath away from a job in telemarketing.

Maybe people with weird haircuts are like structures that become interesting only after being wrecked - Florida ranch houses half-fallen into sinkholes; bankrupt malls; civilizations after a nuclear war. I feel a warm tragic glow knowing I may be of interest to the world only once I have been destroyed.

It's around midnight. After I left Dad, my choice was to either become very drunk or write this. I chose to write this. It felt kind of now-or-never for me.

The past is a finite resource.