Top 350 Douglas Coupland Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder.”

— Douglas Coupland

152. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

154. “With Google I’m starting to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. People in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.”

— Douglas Coupland

155. “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

156. “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

157. “A ring is a halo on your finger.”

— Douglas Coupland

158. “I say ‘Uhmm... ’ a lot. I mentioned this to Karla and she says it’s a CPU word. It means you’re assembling data in your head – spooling.”

— Douglas Coupland

159. “Brain research tells us that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony, which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value.”

— Douglas Coupland

160. “Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness.”

— Douglas Coupland

161. “Anyway, I want to remember that love can happen. Because there is life after not having a life. I never expected love to happen. What was I expecting from life, then?”

— Douglas Coupland

162. “Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.”

— Douglas Coupland

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

163. “Men won’t read any email from a woman that’s over 200 words long.”

— Douglas Coupland

164. “Where does personality end and brain damage begin?”

— Douglas Coupland

165. “Capitalization implies a hierarchy, that some letters are more special than others.”

— Douglas Coupland

166. “Do you ever just want to take your car out onto the highway and gun the engine as fast as you can and then close your eyes and see what happens?”

— Douglas Coupland

167. “As I’m never going to be old, I’m glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness.”

— Douglas Coupland

168. “What is prayer but a wish for the events in your life to string together to form a story – something that makes some sense of events you know have meaning.”

— Douglas Coupland

169. “Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.”

— Douglas Coupland

170. “Lottery tickets are a surtax on desperation.”

— Douglas Coupland

171. “High school is such a shared experience in North American culture.”

— Douglas Coupland

172. “Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives?”

— Douglas Coupland

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

173. “Happy. And then I got afraid that it would vanish as quickly as it came. That it was accidental – that I didn’t deserve it. It’s like this very, very nice car crash that never ends.”

— Douglas Coupland

174. “Our achievements may make us interesting, Tyler, but our darkness makes us lovable.”

— Douglas Coupland

175. “I guess the thing about exposing your heart is that people may not even notice it. Like a flop movie. Or they’ll borrow your heart and they’ll forget to return it to you.”

— Douglas Coupland

176. “Wilcox Fate is for losers.”

— Douglas Coupland

177. “Unhappy endings are just as important as happy endings. They’re an efficient way of transmitting vital Darwinian information. Your brain needs them to make maps of the world, maps that let you know what sorts of people and situations to avoid.”

— Douglas Coupland

178. “After you’re dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what’s going to be your best memory of earth? What one moment for you defines what it’s like to be alive on this planet. What’s your takeaway? Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don’t count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you’re really alive.”

— Douglas Coupland

179. “Beware of the corporate invasion of private memory.”

— Douglas Coupland

180. “Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don’t put it in a list. Don’t even say the words.”

— Douglas Coupland

181. “It’s not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments.”

— Douglas Coupland

182. “I mean five thousand years ago people emerge out of nowhere -sproing!- with brains and everything and begin wrecking the planet. You’d think we’d give the issue a little more thought than we do.”

— Douglas Coupland

183. “Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right.”

— Douglas Coupland

Featured in: Strong Quotes

184. “You’re right, a spleen is a strange thing-we technically don’t need one, but maybe spleens are kept in our bodies in case we mutate or evolve, and if we grow wings or tentacles we need to have the spleen in place in order for them to work.”

— Douglas Coupland

185. “What if it was cats who invented technology, would they have TV shows starring rubber sqeaky toys?”

— Douglas Coupland

186. “I think that to acknowledge a new generation is to acknowledge some degree of obsolescence in yourself, and that is very hard to do and often comes with undeniable anger.”

— Douglas Coupland

187. “The modern economy isn’t about the redistribution of wealth, it’s about the redistribution of time.”

— Douglas Coupland

188. “When we constantly ask for miracles, we’re unraveling the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would not be a world, it would be a cartoon.”

— Douglas Coupland

189. “I have always liked the idea of Superman because I have always liked the idea that there is one person in the world who doesn’t do bad things. And that there is one person in the world who is able to fly.”

— Douglas Coupland

190. “If you want to get close to somebody, you have to tell him or her something intimate about yourself. They’ll tell you something intimate in return, and if you keep this going, maybe you’ll end up in love.”

— Douglas Coupland

191. “Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make.”

— Douglas Coupland

192. “Fun fact: The United Nations building in New York City is the only place in all of North America where smoking is still permitted indoors.”

— Douglas Coupland

193. “I’m an adult. Discipline me and I’ll bury you alive. – Roger.”

— Douglas Coupland

194. “Do you remember that old TV series, Get Smart? Do you remember at the beginning where Maxwell Smart is walking down the secret corridor and there are all of those doors that open sideways, and upside down and gateways and stuff? I think that everyone keeps a whole bunch of doors just like this between themselves and the world. But when you’re in love, all of your doors are open, and all of their doors are open. And you roller-skate down your halls together.”

— Douglas Coupland

195. “At least when you’re young you’re also stupid.”

— Douglas Coupland

196. “I really do force myself to not be fully engaged with all the technology at once, just because I have an addictive personality and I get too into it.”

— Douglas Coupland

197. “I don’t want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.”

— Douglas Coupland

198. “Sometimes failure isn’t an opportunity in disguise, it’s just you.”

— Douglas Coupland

199. “Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that’s sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.”

— Douglas Coupland

200. “All systems have failed me. In five minutes I’ll be fine again for a while, but right now the inside of my head feels like Niagara Falls without the noise, just this mist and churning and no real sense of where earth ends and heaven begins.”

— Douglas Coupland