Top 350 Douglas Coupland Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 8

101. “ETHNOMAGNETISM: The tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods: ‘You wouldn’t understand it there, mother-they hug where I live now.’”

— Douglas Coupland

102. “We’re rapidly approaching a world comprised entirely of jail and shopping.”

— Douglas Coupland

103. “Life always wins.”

— Douglas Coupland

104. “A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you’re past it.”

— Douglas Coupland

105. “In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness.”

— Douglas Coupland

106. “You can’t fake competence, creativity, or sexual arousal.”

— Douglas Coupland

107. “You can’t get mad at weather because weather’s not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life.”

— Douglas Coupland

108. “Gap clothing allows you to look like you’re from nowhere and anywhere.”

— Douglas Coupland

109. “In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as though we are spellcast. We speak in sentences that end before finishing. We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone. We bump into others and feel bashful at recognizing souls so similar to ourselves.”

— Douglas Coupland

110. “Sometimes you can’t realize you’re in a bad mood until another person enters your orbit.”

— Douglas Coupland

111. “We’re all born lost, aren’t we? We’re all born separated from God – over and over life makes sure to inform us of this – and yet we’re all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must.”

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

113. “I think God is how you deal with everything that’s out of your own control.”

— Douglas Coupland

114. “Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What – suddenly you’ve magically turned into Noam Chomsky?”

— Douglas Coupland

115. “Later, I would learn that coincidences are the most planned things in the world. Later, I would learn that every single moment is a coincidence.”

— Douglas Coupland

116. “What is human behavior, except trying to prove that we’re not animals?”

— Douglas Coupland

117. “When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.”

— Douglas Coupland

118. “The heart of a man is like deep water.”

— Douglas Coupland

119. “Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn’t arrive.”

— Douglas Coupland

120. “Every single moment is a coincidence.”

— Douglas Coupland

121. “We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.”

— Douglas Coupland

122. “I think the killers get far too much attention.”

— Douglas Coupland

123. “It’s just amazing how hard it is for people to change, even when amazing things happen. It almost reinforces who you are instead of making you change.”

— Douglas Coupland

124. “Here’s what I think: the five most unattractive traits in people are cheapness, clinginess, neediness, unwillingness to change and jealousy. Jealousy is the worst, and by far the hardest to conceal.”

— Douglas Coupland

125. “You can only fall in love six times in your life. Choose wisely.”

— Douglas Coupland

126. “When Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, was he trading up or trading down?”

— Douglas Coupland

127. “We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.”

— Douglas Coupland

128. “I find people who prejudge reality TV to be annoying. Art comes from anywhere. Culture can ooze out of any crack. Prejudging is the death of creativity.”

— Douglas Coupland

129. “The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything.”

— Douglas Coupland

130. “The real killers in the business world aren’t the ones who aim for the top, it’s the ones who aim for two notches below the top.”

— Douglas Coupland

131. “Could the situation be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised Heaven in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can’t help but suffer in comparison.”

— Douglas Coupland

132. “We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone.”

— Douglas Coupland

133. “Ski boots are the worst. Solid plastic. They’ll be around till the sun goes supernova.”

— Douglas Coupland

134. “Sometimes I think God is like weather – you may not like the weather, but it has nothing to do with you. You just happen to be there. Deal with it. Sadness and grief are part of being human and always will be.”

— Douglas Coupland

135. “Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave.”

— Douglas Coupland

136. “If God drives a car, He’d drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, with oxblood leather upholstery and an opera window.”

— Douglas Coupland

137. “Only losers make decisions when things are bad. The time to rejig your life is the time when it’s seemingly smooth.”

— Douglas Coupland

138. “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.”

— Douglas Coupland

139. “A good piece of technology dreams of the day when it will be replaced by a newer piece of technology. This is one definition of progress.”

— Douglas Coupland

140. “I didn’t realize then that so much of being adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience.”

— Douglas Coupland

141. “Time erases both the best and the worst of us.”

— Douglas Coupland

142. “If you’re not spending every waking moment of your day radically rethinking the nature of the world-if you’re not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order-then you’re wasting your day.”

— Douglas Coupland

143. “Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they’ll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective.”

— Douglas Coupland

144. “The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder.”

— Douglas Coupland

145. “When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they’re going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they’re going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.”

— Douglas Coupland

146. “I like having a beard. My beard changes my face shape and allows me to see in it family members who I love and can’t see otherwise.”

— Douglas Coupland

147. “Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.”

— Douglas Coupland

148. “This was unexpected, my soul’s connection to you. You stole my loneliness. No one knows that I was wishing for you, a thief, to enter my house of autonomy, that I had locked my doors but my windows were open, hoping, but not believing, you would enter.”

— Douglas Coupland

149. “Failure is authentic, and because it’s authentic, it’s real and genuine, and because of that, it’s a pure state of being.”

— Douglas Coupland

150. “Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it’s going to disappear completely.”

— Douglas Coupland