Top 350 Douglas Coupland Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The belief that tomorrow is a different place from today is certainly a unique hallmark of our species.”

— 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. “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

154. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

156. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

165. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

168. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.”

— Douglas Coupland

174. “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

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. “People will always choose more money over more sex.”

— Douglas Coupland

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

182. “Sometimes I think God is like weather – you may not like the weather, but it has nothing to do wit you. You just happen to be there. Deal with it.”

— Douglas Coupland

183. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “Wilcox Fate is for losers.”

— Douglas Coupland

190. “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.”

— Douglas Coupland

191. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

193. “I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.”

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

197. “It’s very strange that most people don’t care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.”

— Douglas Coupland

198. “What’s a bar bill but a surtax on reality?”

— Douglas Coupland

199. “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

200. “Make your goals big and broad enough so that they never become answered prayers and boomerang to curse you.”

— Douglas Coupland