Top 350 Douglas Coupland Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.”

— Douglas Coupland

252. “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

253. “Your Joan of Arcs and Supermans don’t come around too often. Mostly, the world is made up of people like me, plodding along. It’s what most people do – plod, plod, plod. While it kills me to come to grips with the fact that I’m like everyone else, that pain is outweighed by the comfort I get from being a member of the human race.”

— Douglas Coupland

254. “I have trouble with seafood because it tastes like a dock.”

— Douglas Coupland

255. “Discussions of generations only go downhill. There’s no point in having them.”

— Douglas Coupland

256. “Imagine you’re a forty-year-old, Richard,” Hamilton said to me around this time, while working as a salesman at a Radio Shack in Lynn Valley,“and suddenly somebody comes up to you saying, ‘Hi, I’d like you to meet Kevin. Kevin is eighteen and will be making all of your career decisions for you.’ I’d be flipped out. Wouldn’t you? But that’s what life is all about – some eighteen-year-old kid making your big decisions for you that stick for a lifetime.” He shuddered.”

— Douglas Coupland

257. “I believe that you’ve had most of your important memories by the time you’re thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup.”

— Douglas Coupland

258. “Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler.”

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

260. “Las Vegas is a SimCity game gone horribly wrong.”

— Douglas Coupland

261. “I think individual people are interesting, not really groups of people.”

— Douglas Coupland

262. “I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along.”

— Douglas Coupland

263. “Los Angelenos dress like they’ve been focus-grouped.”

— Douglas Coupland

264. “I want pills called September 10. You take one and your mind feels like the 11th never happened.”

— Douglas Coupland

265. “Question: If there were two of you which one would win?”

— Douglas Coupland

266. “How can I be a part of the 1960s generation when I don’t even remember any of it?”

— Douglas Coupland

267. “What exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human? There has to be something. How odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people.”

— Douglas Coupland

268. “Being asked what animal you’d like to be is a trick question; you’re already an animal.”

— Douglas Coupland

269. “Canadians can easily ‘pass for American’ as long as we don’t accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.”

— Douglas Coupland

270. “I want to see books taken out of historical time and placed into a different timeline, such as evolutionary or geological time, as a means of putting the human experience in context.”

— Douglas Coupland

271. “There is no shame in impulse.”

— Douglas Coupland

272. “It was pivotal in making you but you don’t remember it. Or do you? Do we understand the events that make us who we are? Do we understand the factors that make us do the things we do?”

— Douglas Coupland

273. “Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.”

— Douglas Coupland

274. “I curled myself into a ball and cried quietly, doing that thing that only young people can do, namely, feeling sorry for myself. Once you’re past thirty you lose that ability; instead of feeling sorry for yourself you turn bitter.”

— Douglas Coupland

275. “I kind of wonder if creativity is all morphing into one big thing that’s not even art, but something universal and bigger.”

— Douglas Coupland

276. “I think there is a Paris inside us all.”

— Douglas Coupland

277. “It’d be preposterous for me to propose a universal cure to loneliness but I will say that people who do the things they find interesting, either creatively or vocationally, tend to become unlonely very quickly.”

— Douglas Coupland

278. “A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.”

— Douglas Coupland

279. “You’ve seen what you’ve seen; you’ve felt what you’ve felt. Ideology is for people who don’t trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world.”

— Douglas Coupland

280. “Canadian winters are long. Life is hard and so is ice.”

— Douglas Coupland

281. “I imagine I sow cuttings of Anna-Louise’s hair, like the fine stems of dried flowers, and watch sunflowers grow from the cuttings. I imagine I bury a pocket calculator with liquid crystals spelling her name, then watch the earth shoot forth lightning bolts. ‘We should open up a seafood house together,’ Anna-Louise says when she wants to torture me. Now that’s love.”

— Douglas Coupland

282. “TV is all about hair. And then skin. And then clothing. And then it’s about your voice. And finally the report, what you’re actually saying. And 99 times out of 100, it never gets past the hair.”

— Douglas Coupland

283. “I think writing would have happened to me anyway, somehow. Differently, but it still would have happened.”

— Douglas Coupland

284. “It is with these thoughts in mind that I now see the drifter’s windburned face when I now consider my world-his face that reminds that there is still something left to believe in after there is nothing left to believe. A face for people like me-who were pushed to the edge of loneliness and who maybe fell off and who when we climbed back on, our world never looked the same.”

— Douglas Coupland

285. “Gore is nature’s way of saying, “There are too many human beings on the planet, and I’m trying to rectify this any way I can. SARS didn’t work, but trust me, I’m cooking up something better. In the interim, please kill lots of yourselves.”

— Douglas Coupland

286. “Mom said that people are interested in birds only in as much as they exhibit human behavior – greed and stupidity and anger – and by doing so they free us from the unique sorrow of being human... I told Mom my own theory of why we like birds – of how birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.”

— Douglas Coupland

287. “If you don’t have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can’t expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.”

— Douglas Coupland

288. “Hi! I’m Ethan, I shop at Ikea. I bought a $300 dining suite and it took me three days to assemble!”

— Douglas Coupland

289. “I’d take a helicopter up and throw microwave ovens down on the Taco Bell.”

— Douglas Coupland

290. “She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?”

— Douglas Coupland

291. “Death without the possibility of ever changing the world is the same as a life that never was.”

— Douglas Coupland

292. “Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.”

— Douglas Coupland

293. “I like the present. I’m always interested in new ideas, and what’s happening. I’m not nostalgic.”

— Douglas Coupland

294. “I think, there are people for whom freedom is a bigger, more important thing than stability.”

— Douglas Coupland

295. “It’s amazing how you can be a total shithead, and yet your soul still wants to hang out with you.”

— Douglas Coupland

296. “We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they’re so rude.”

— Douglas Coupland

297. “Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they’ll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective. Sometimes I’d just like to mace them. I want to tell them that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for blindly handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear.”

— Douglas Coupland

298. “It’s never felt more Canadian to be Canadian than it does now.”

— Douglas Coupland

299. “I think if human beings had genuine courage, they’d wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. Wouldn’t life be more interesting that way? And now that I think about it, why the heck don’t they? Who made the rule that everybody has to dress like sheep 364 days of the year? Think of all the people you’d meet if they were in costume every day. People would be so much easier to talk to – like talking to dogs.”

— Douglas Coupland

300. “To bring order into this jangled sphere man must find its centre” Marshall McLuhan.”

— Douglas Coupland