Douglas Coupland Quotes

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

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

You can't fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.

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

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

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.

Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo.

We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.

Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?

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.

Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine.

The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth - it's about the redistribution of time.

One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.

Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.

Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.

Your body isn't just a body. It's an ecosystem.

Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.

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

I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and rename three o'clock 'Pepsi.

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

Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel. The smell. Try and you can't. The brain doesn't process negatives.

When Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, was he trading up or trading down?

New York is a theme park for people with IQs over 108.

Adventure without risk is Disneyland.

Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

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.

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.

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

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

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.

I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.

You know what the best thing is about the end of the day? Tomorrow, it starts all over again.

There are three things we cry for in life: things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.

The harder you try to become the opposite of your parents, the more quickly you become them.

You can't get mad at weather because weather's not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life.

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

Every single moment is a coincidence.

Figure out what it is in life you don't do well, and then don't do it.

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

Most people can't handle a structureless life.

Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.

If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.

Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you.

We're rapidly approaching a world comprised entirely of jail and shopping.

Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity.

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

Forget about being world famous, it's hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.

A ring is a halo on your finger.

Salad bars are like a restaurant's lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.