Douglas Coupland Quotes - Page 12

HISTORICALOVERDOSING:To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen.

I sandpapered the roof of my mouth with 3 bowls of Cap'n Crunch - had raw gobbets of mouth-beef dangling onto my tongue all day

The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder.

MCJOB: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice for people who have never held one.

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.

Most people can't handle a structureless life.

At least when you're young you're also stupid.

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

I'm an adult. Discipline me and I'll bury you alive. - Roger

STRANGELOVE REPRODUCTION: Having children to make up for the fact that one no longer believes in the future.

PERSONALITY TITHE: A price paid for becoming a couple; previously amusing human beings become boring: 'Thanks for inviting us, but Noreen and I are going to look at flatware catalogs tonight. Afterward we're going to watch the shopping channel.

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.

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.

OPTION PARALYSIS: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.

I know it's not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli?

just then a bee bumbled above us and stole our attention the way flying things can

You really have to wonder why we even bother to get up in the morning. I mean, really: Why work? Simply to buy more stuff? That's just not enough. Look at us all. What's the common assumption that got us all from there to here? What makes us deserve the ice cream and running shoes and wool Italian suits we have? I mean, I see all of us trying so hard to acquire so much stuff, but I can't help but feeling that we didn't merit it.

ETHNOMAGNETISM: The tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods: 'You wouldn't understand it there, mother - they hug where I live now.'

TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.

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.

Chronotropic Drugs:Drugs engineered to affect one's sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect.

Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What — suddenly you’ve magically turned into Noam Chomsky?

Everyone has a special place they store their tension (I'm on shiatsu duty), the same way everyone misspells the same words over and over. Karla stores her tension in her rhomboid muscles, and I remove it. This is making me feel good. That I can do this.

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is fantastic. It's volcanic and sexy and utterly unlike anything I've read before. It feels like the future in a dazzling way that has nothing to do with looking backward. It's been a long wait for a new novel from Mark Leyner, but worth it. Ten out of ten from me.

It's never felt more Canadian to be Canadian than it does now.