Top 350 Douglas Coupland Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I’m kidding. But killing helps.”

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

306. “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

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

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

309. “Q: If you could be an animal, what kind of animal would you be? A: You already are an animal.”

— Douglas Coupland

310. “Maybe people with weird haircuts are like structures that become interesting only after being wrecked – Florida ranch houses half-fallen into sinkholes; bankrupt malls; civilizations after a nuclear war. I feel a warm tragic glow knowing I may be of interest to the world only once I have been destroyed.”

— Douglas Coupland

311. “It hit him that his own form of loneliness was a luxury, one as chosen and as paid for as three weeks in Kenya’s velds or a cherry red Ferrari. Real loneliness wasn’t something an assistant scoped out and got a good price on. Real loneliness was smothering and it stank of hopelessness.”

— Douglas Coupland

312. “Sometimes I think the people to feel the saddest for are people who are unable to connect with the profound – people such as my boring brother-in-law, a hearty type so concerned with normality and fitting in that he eliminates any possibility of uniqueness for himself and his own personality. I wonder if some day, when he is older, he will wake up and the deeper part of him will realize that he has never allowed himself to truly exist, and he will cry with regret and shame and grief.”

— Douglas Coupland

313. “I don’t understand beauty.”

— Douglas Coupland

314. “We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but instead because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.”

— Douglas Coupland

315. “And I wondered then, how do we ever know what beauty lies inside of people, and the strange ways this world works to lure that beauty outward?”

— Douglas Coupland

316. “I ma trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition.”

— Douglas Coupland

317. “With the first drink comes the truth, with the second drink comes wishful thinking, and with the third drink come the lies.”

— Douglas Coupland

318. “We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age.”

— Douglas Coupland

319. “The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.”

— Douglas Coupland

320. “Jason’s father, Reg, always said “Love what God loves and hate what God hates,” but more often than not I had the impression that he really meant “Love what Reg loves and hate what Reg hates.”

— Douglas Coupland

321. “If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil.”

— Douglas Coupland

322. “I don’t think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.”

— Douglas Coupland

323. “It was a December night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moon – lung-burning; mentholated and pure.”

— Douglas Coupland

324. “Nearly all of the Nobodies he saw were men. Women, he thought, had so many more ways to connect themselves to the world – children, families, friends.”

— Douglas Coupland

325. “If somebody wants to run for office, they had better to explain why they want to run for office. Wanting to be a candidate seems, in itself, reason for exclusion.”

— Douglas Coupland

326. “Telling people they look relaxed makes them look relaxed.”

— Douglas Coupland

327. “You know, from what I’ve seen, at twenty you know you’re not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you’re not going to be a dentist or a professional. And by thirty, a darkness starts moving in – you wonder if you’re ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you’re going to be doing the rest of your life; you become resigned to your fate.”

— Douglas Coupland

328. “Society indeed conspires to keep you ball and chained.”

— Douglas Coupland

329. “If nothing else, we simply get used to being alive.”

— Douglas Coupland

330. “How did society ever function without you, little Sharpies? Your nibs have the precise amount of give to create a line quality with character, yet not so much character as to be smushy. Thank you, little pens.”

— Douglas Coupland

331. “And so the point of this story is that when I first met you at the photocopy machine, sure, we talked like a telethon and everything, but the perfume you were wearing then – that perfume was the smell of my stamp album, the smell of countries I always wanted to visit but never thought I’d be able to. It was like you had the world inside you.”

— Douglas Coupland

332. “Once you establish a look, and once everybody recognizes that look as your look, you never have to think about fashion again.”

— Douglas Coupland

333. “When you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you. It’s called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don’t. Here is a list of the symptoms, and don’t worry-loneliness is the most universal sensation on the planet. Just remember one fact-loneliness will pass. You will survive and you will be a better human for it.”

— Douglas Coupland

334. “Abe: Wise hermit cast adrift on asteroid for thousands of years; has developed odd code languages for everyday actions; lonely but not bitter; his heart is cryogenically frozen, and he must search the universe pursuing the Thawer.”

— Douglas Coupland

335. “I am reminded that no matter how hard you try, you can never be more than twelve years old with your parents.”

— Douglas Coupland

336. “TERMINAL WANDERLUST: A condition common to people of transient middle-class upbringings. Unable to feel rooted in any one environment, they move continually in the hopes of finding an idealized sense of community in the next location.”

— Douglas Coupland

337. “When I was younger I used to worry so much about being alone – of being unlovable or incapable of love. As the years went on, my worries changed. I worried that I had become incapable of having a relationship, of offering intimacy. I felt as though the world lived inside a warm house at night and I was outside, and I couldn’t be seen – because I was out there in the night. But now I am inside that house and it feels just the same.”

— Douglas Coupland

338. “You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young.”

— Douglas Coupland

339. “Our conversations are never easy, but as I-we-get older, we are finding that our conversations must bespoken. A need burns inside us to share with others what we are feeling Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic. It is as though the coolness that marked out youth is itself a type of retrovirus that can only leave you feeling empty. Full of holes.”

— Douglas Coupland

340. “And for a while they were happy in their own manner; they had the animal confidence money affords.”

— Douglas Coupland

341. “I’d sooner have died than admit that the most valuable thing I owned was a fairly extensive collection of German industrial music dance mix EP records stored for even further embarrassment under a box of crumbling Christmas tree ornaments in a Portland, Oregon basement. So I told him I owned nothing of any value.”

— Douglas Coupland

342. “It’s what makes us different from every other creature in the world – we have time. And we have choices.”

— Douglas Coupland

343. “I think that emotions affect you as much as x-rays and vitamins and car crashes.”

— Douglas Coupland

344. “I was convinced that all of the people I’d ever gone to school with were headed for great things in life and I wasn’t. They were having more fun; finding more meaning in life.”

— Douglas Coupland

345. “Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment – that being alive is important, because just when you least expect it, you might receive exactly what you least expect.”

— Douglas Coupland

346. “I’ve always been interested in the unintended side effects of technology. For instance, when the car was invented, who would have thought dogs would like sticking their heads out the window to enjoy the scentscape generated by speed and wind?”

— Douglas Coupland

347. “If our subconscious was attractive, we wouldn’t have to bury it down deep within us.”

— Douglas Coupland

348. “Exposing hypocrisy doesn’t make you a moral person.”

— Douglas Coupland

349. “I once read that for every person currently alive on earth, there are nineteen dead people who have lived before us. That’s not that much really. Our existence as a species on earth has been so short. We forget that.”

— Douglas Coupland

350. “We then return our gaze to the mirror-boxed future-towns circling us-the hard drives of our culture, where the human tribe is making flesh its deepest needs and fears; teaching machines to think; accelerating the pace of obsolescence; designing new animals to replace the animals we’ve erased; value adding; reconstructing the future.”

— Douglas Coupland