Top 350 Douglas Coupland Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Good looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters.”

— Douglas Coupland

202. “Thinking you’re immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal.”

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

204. “The past is a finite resource.”

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

207. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

209. “Quick. Name ten dead redheads.”

— Douglas Coupland

210. “So where do you start when you want to start your life again?”

— Douglas Coupland

211. “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

212. “I know it’s not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli?”

— Douglas Coupland

213. “Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.”

— Douglas Coupland

214. “Only the disenfranchised can party with abandon.”

— Douglas Coupland

215. “I felt like I was walking on an airport’s rubber conveyor belt.”

— Douglas Coupland

216. “Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without.”

— Douglas Coupland

217. “I was sick of wanting money. I was sick of being without a goal.”

— Douglas Coupland

218. “If cats were double the size they are now, they’d probably be illegal.”

— Douglas Coupland

219. “When you see such photos, you can’t help but wonder at just how sweet and sad and innocent all moments of life are rendered by the tripping of a camera’s shutter, for at that point the future is still unknown and has yet to hurt us, and also for that brief moment, our poses are accepted as honest.”

— Douglas Coupland

220. “And yet in the end did we ever really give each other completely to the other? Do either of us even know how to really share ourselves? Imagine the house is on fire and I reach to save one thing – what is it? Do you know? Imagine that I am drowning and I reach within myself to save that one memory which is me – what is it? Do you know? What things would either of us reach for? Neither of us know. After all these years we just wouldn’t know.”

— Douglas Coupland

221. “There’s a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream.”

— Douglas Coupland

222. “You fear that if you lower your guard for even one second your whole world will disintegrate into chaos.”

— Douglas Coupland

223. “My brain feels like a cool, deep lake.”

— Douglas Coupland

224. “I am aware that there is a world out there that functions without regard to me. There are wars and budgets and bombings and vast dimensions of wealth and greed and ambition and corruption. And yet I don’t feel a part of that world, and I wouldn’t know how to join if I tried.”

— Douglas Coupland

225. “The world is a glorious place, and filled with so many unexpected moments that I’d get lumps in my throat, as though I were watching a bride walk down the aisle – moments as eternal and full of love as the lifting of veils, the saying of vows and the moment of the first wedded kiss.”

— Douglas Coupland

226. “Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.”

— Douglas Coupland

227. “You can get a subjective and highly factual dossier on most anyone in the public realm almost instantly. It’s why publishers don’t worry about author photos any more; people just Google a person and get on with things.”

— Douglas Coupland

228. “Figure out what it is in life you don’t do well, and then don’t do it.”

— Douglas Coupland

229. “There are few, if any, Canadian men that have never spelled their name in a snow bank.”

— Douglas Coupland

230. “The Vienna Franks are a good example of urban white acid folk revivalism crossed with ska.”

— Douglas Coupland

231. “In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.”

— Douglas Coupland

232. “Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it’s been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.”

— Douglas Coupland

233. “A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age – regardless of how they look on the outside – pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.”

— Douglas Coupland

234. “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.”

— Douglas Coupland

235. “Florida isn’t so much a place where one goes to reinvent oneself, as it is a place where one goes if one no longer wished to be found.”

— Douglas Coupland

236. “When you’re young, you always feel that life hasn’t yet begun – that “life” is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays – whenever. But then suddenly you’re old and the scheduled life didn’t arrive. You find yourself asking, ‘Well then, exactly what was it I was having – that interlude – the scrambly madness – all that time I had before?”

— Douglas Coupland

237. “I’ve given up wanting to make a killing or be a bigshot. I just want to find happiness and maybe open up a little roadside cafe in Idaho.”

— Douglas Coupland

238. “HISTORICAL SLUMMING: the act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural villageslocations where time appears to have been frozen many years backso as to experience relief when one returns back to’the present’.”

— Douglas Coupland

239. “You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog.”

— Douglas Coupland

240. “I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain to be alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything.”

— Douglas Coupland

241. “Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic.”

— Douglas Coupland

242. “Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me.”

— Douglas Coupland

243. “Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they’ve been told they have lots in common.”

— Douglas Coupland

244. “Keep your treasure to yourself.”

— Douglas Coupland

245. “Tofu hot dogs are actually scarier than real hot dogs. It’s like wanting the worst possible meat product without even the thrill of it actually being meat.”

— Douglas Coupland

246. “Star Trek characters never go shopping.”

— Douglas Coupland

247. “Kids today do nothing. They’re so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain.”

— Douglas Coupland

248. “Clowns drink to blot out the ravages of terrifying children for a living.”

— Douglas Coupland

249. “What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.”

— Douglas Coupland

250. “I broke out into a sweat and the worlds of Rilke, the poet, entered my brain – his notion that 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