Top 350 Douglas Coupland Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.”

— Douglas Coupland

Featured in: Relationship Quotes

2. “Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony.”

— Douglas Coupland

3. “TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.”

— Douglas Coupland

4. “Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn’t exist yet. Fate is for losers!”

— Douglas Coupland

5. “Adventure without risk is Disneyland.”

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

7. “Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad lasts for very very long.”

— Douglas Coupland

8. “There are three things we cry for in life: things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.”

— Douglas Coupland

9. “Your body isn’t just a body. It’s an ecosystem.”

— Douglas Coupland

10. “Blame is just a lazy person’s way of making sense of chaos.”

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

12. “OPTION PARALYSIS: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.”

— Douglas Coupland

13. “I build my life so that I don’t wake up for anything. Ever. If you make me get up early to do something with you, I will hate you and resent you and figure out a way of never having to work with you ever again.”

— Douglas Coupland

14. “Christmas makes everything twice as sad.”

— Douglas Coupland

15. “Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.”

— Douglas Coupland

16. “Ten commandments yet seven deadly sins: conflict?”

— Douglas Coupland

17. “In our heads we’re all about 33 years old.”

— Douglas Coupland

18. “Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience.”

— Douglas Coupland

19. “The universe hands you opportunities for a while, and if you don’t take them, the universe says to itself, ‘Oh I see, this person doesn’t like opportunities’ and stops giving them to you.”

— Douglas Coupland

20. “Shopping is Not Creating.”

— Douglas Coupland

21. “Besides, animals don’t even have time. Only humans have time. It’s what makes us different.”

— Douglas Coupland

22. “Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.”

— Douglas Coupland

23. “Nobody cares about worthiness. People care about what is real inside of you.”

— Douglas Coupland

24. “Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.”

— Douglas Coupland

25. “Here’s my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can’t fake are erections, competence and creativity.”

— Douglas Coupland

26. “Knee-Jerk Irony: The tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation.”

— Douglas Coupland

27. “The more you want something to happen, the harder it becomes.”

— Douglas Coupland

28. “My secret is that I need God – that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.”

— Douglas Coupland

29. “The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.”

— Douglas Coupland

30. “And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning’s will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.”

— Douglas Coupland

31. “If your life had lyrics, would they be any good?”

— Douglas Coupland

32. “Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one’s taking.”

— Douglas Coupland

33. “Vaccinated Time Travel: To fantasize about traveling backward in time, but only with proper vaccinations.”

— Douglas Coupland

34. “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.”

— Douglas Coupland

35. “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.”

— Douglas Coupland

36. “There’s much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world’s probably a better place for it.”

— Douglas Coupland

37. “If human beings had genuine courage, they’d wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.”

— Douglas Coupland

38. “People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity.”

— Douglas Coupland

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

39. “As you grow older, it becomes harder to feel 100 percent happy; you learn all the things that can go wrong, you become superstitious about tempting fate, about bringing disaster upon your life by accidentally feeling too good one day.”

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

41. “Flying dreams mean that you’re doing the right thing with your life.”

— Douglas Coupland

42. “Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.”

— Douglas Coupland

43. “Time perception is very much about how you sequence your activities, how many activities you layer overtop of others, and the types of gaps, if any, you leave in between activities.”

— Douglas Coupland

44. “We are changed souls; we don’t look at things the same way anymore. For there was a time when we expected the worst. But then the worst happened, did it not? And so we will never be surprised again.”

— Douglas Coupland

45. “NOSTALGIA IS A WEAPON.”

— Douglas Coupland

46. “Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn’t take a break from you.”

— Douglas Coupland

47. “If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it’s a failure.”

— Douglas Coupland

48. “Salad bars are like a restaurant’s lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.”

— Douglas Coupland

49. “SAFETY NET-ISM: The belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life’s hurts. Usually parents.”

— Douglas Coupland

50. “MCJOB: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice for people who have never held one.”

— Douglas Coupland