Top 350 Douglas Coupland Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “So where do you start when you want to start your life again?”

— Douglas Coupland

202. “Good looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters.”

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

204. “The past is a finite resource.”

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

207. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

211. “Quick. Name ten dead redheads.”

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

213. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “Star Trek characters never go shopping.”

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

243. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

245. “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

246. “Is that all time is – our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass?”

— Douglas Coupland

247. “She went crazy with a calm face, justifiably so.”

— Douglas Coupland

248. “Keep your treasure to yourself.”

— Douglas Coupland

249. “How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we knit together this place we call the world? Without stories our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It’s a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.”

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland