Douglas Coupland Quotes - Page 15

Gap clothing allows you to look like you're from nowhere and anywhere.

In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.

Thinking you're immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal.

We're all born lost, aren't we? We're all born separated from God - over and over life makes sure to inform us of this - and yet we're all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must.

The heart of a man is like deep water

Truth be told, John said, the one thing in this world I want more than anything else is a great big crowbar, to jimmy myself open and take whatever creature that's sitting inside and shake it clean like a rug and then rinse it in a cold, clear lake like up in Oregon, and then I want to put it under the sun to let it heal and dry and grow and sit and come to consciousness again with a clear and quiet mind.

The future and eternity are two entirely different things.

The universe hands you opportunities for a while, and if you don't take them, the universe says to itself, 'Oh I see, this person doesn't like opportunities' and stops giving them to you.

I thought about 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. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no animal equivalent were smoking, body-building and writing. That's not much, considering how special we seem to think we are.

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.

There is no shame in impulse.

I think God is how you deal with everything that's out of your own control.

Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo.

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.

The best part of my life is gone, and what remains is whizzing past so quickly I feel like I'm Krazy-Glue'ed onto a mechanical bull of a time machine.

Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.

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.

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.

Time, Baby - so much, so much time left until the end of my life - sometimes I go crazy at how slowly time passes yet how quickly my body ages. But I shouldn't allow myself to think like this. I have to remind myself that time only frightens me when I think of having to spend it alone. Sometimes I scare myself with how many of my thoughts revolve around making me feel better about sleeping alone in a room.

Why are we even here [on earth], what's our human nature? It's precipitating a real philosophical crisis that I find quite fascinating.

In the old days people had far fewer channels in which to place their imaginative time. There's definitely more competition for time . . . and yet people seem to be reading [books] as much.

I really do force myself to not be fully engaged with all the technology at once, just because I have an addictive personality and I get too into it.

The more you want something to happen, the harder it becomes.

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

So much information lacks a good way to store it, especially when it's all digital; sometimes it requires old technology to go back and retrieve it.