Douglas Coupland Quotes - Page 13

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

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?

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.

I think that to acknowledge a new generation is to acknowledge some degree of obsolescence in yourself, and that is very hard to do and often comes with undeniable anger.

I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst? ... If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet -- with just one person inside even -- I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does.

Besides, animals don’t even have time. Only humans have time. It’s what makes us different.

I've got 911 on speed dial.

The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I'm kidding. But killing helps.

If our subconscious was attractive, we wouldn't have to bury it down deep within us.

...and when you meet someone and fall in love, and they fall in love with you, you ask them "Will you take my heart-- stains and all?" and they say "I will," and they ask you the same question and you say, "I will," too.

I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom.

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

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.

Later, I would learn that coincidences are the most planned things in the world. Later, I would learn that every single moment is a coincidence.

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

High school is such a shared experience in North American culture.

And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.

Los Angelenos dress like they've been focus-grouped.

All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.

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

Keep your treasure to yourself.

The new world lies before her eyes like an opened chest of treasure, a flock of birds over Africa, a thousand TVs all playing at once.

Sometimes you accidentally input an extra digit into the year: i.e, 19993 and you add 18,000 years on to *now*, and you realize that the year 19993 will one day exist and that time is a scary thing, indeed.

God is what keeps us together after the love is gone.

If God drives a car, He'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, with oxblood leather upholstery and an opera window.