Quotes from Douglas Coupland

Maybe thinking you're supposed to 'have a life' is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be. How do we know that all of these people with 'no lives' aren't really on the new frontier of human sentience and preceptions?

Anti-sabbatical: A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions

Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.

Canadian winters are long. Life is hard and so is ice.

I don't understand the human heart. Only pain makes it grow stronger. Only sorrow makes it kind. Contentment makes it wither, and joy seems to build walls around it.

Anna-Louise leans over and whispers in my ear. This is so surreal, she says, I think I'm turning into a melting clock.

Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment--that being alive is important, because just when you least expect it, you might receive exactly what you least expect.

When you're young, you feel like life hasn't yet begun, like life is scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays - whenever. But suddenly you're old, and the scheduled life never arrived. I find myself asking, 'Well, then, exactly what was it I was doing with all that time I had before I thought my life would begin?

Dag insists that all dogs secretly speak the English language and subscribe to the morals and beliefs of the Unitarian church...

It's so hard to balance in our minds the knowledge that 'the world' is mundanely 'a planet.' The former is so holy; the latter merely a science project.

In my ears i hear a noise, and this noise is the sound of the color of the sun.

And when you do find this letter, you know what? Something extraordinary will happen. It will be like a reverse solar eclipse - the sun will start shining down in the middle of night, imagine that!

Only pain makes it grow stronger. One sorrow makes it kind. Contentment makes it wither, and joy seems to build walls around it. The heart is perverse, and it is cruel. I hate the heart and seems to hate me.

You will see the effects of dark secrets making themselves known-- via their minds and bodies and via the stories your friends...will begin telling you...The only payback for all of this-- for the conversion of their once-young hearts into tar--will be that you will love your friends more, even though they have made you see the universe as an emptier and scarier place...

The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I'm kidding. But killing helps.

And the reason Luke is thinking about time and free will is because he believes that money is the closest human beings have ever come to crystallizing time and free will into a compact physical form. Cash. Cash is a time crystal. Cash allows you to multiply your will, and it allows you to speed up time. Cash is what defines us as a species. Nothing else in the universe has money.

Life is so expensive.

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

I had been feeling permanently on the cusp of a flu, feeling at that point where I just wanted to borrow somebody else's coat- borrow somebody else's life- their aura. I seemed to have lost the ability to create any more aura on my own.

TERMINAL WANDERLUST: A condition common to people of transient middle-class upbringings. Unable to feel rooted in any one environment, they move continually in the hopes of finding an idealized sense of community in the next location.

You don't believe magic is possible in lives lived within traditional boundaries.

You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about yourself.

It's hard to get mad at Neal, because he suffers from a medical condition called total fucking stupidity.

Nearly all of the Nobodies he saw were men. Women, he thought, had so many more ways to connect themselves to the world--children, families, friends.