Douglas Coupland Quotes - Page 2

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

It's not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments.

Strange how when you're young you have no memories...Then one day you wake up and BOOM, memories overpower all else in your life, forever making the present moment seem sad and unable to compete with a glorious past that now has a life of its own.

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

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

I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.

If your life had lyrics, would they be any good?

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

I am a quiet man. I tend to think things through and try not to say too much. But here I am, saying perhaps too much. But there are these feelings inside me which need badly to escape, I guess. And this makes me feel relieved because one of my big concerns these past few years is that I've been losing my ability to feel things with the same intensity- the way I felt when I was younger. It's scary- to feel your emotions floating away and just not caring. I guess what's really scary is not caring about the loss.

Adventure without risk is Disneyland.

If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.

So where do you start when you want to start your life again?

Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.

If you want to get close to somebody, you have to tell him or her something intimate about yourself. They'll tell you something intimate in return, and if you keep this going, maybe you'll end up in love.

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

Flying dreams mean that you're doing the right thing with your life.

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.

MID-TWENTIES BREAKDOWN: A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.

I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.

When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.

Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.

Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad lasts for very very long.

The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be healing—a blanket—the comfort of a friend. Without at least some rain in any given day, or at least a cloud or two on the horizon, I feel overwhelmed by the information of sunlight and yearn for the vital, muffling gift of falling water.

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.