Douglas Coupland Quotes - Page 6

There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.

...you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.

You can never become rich unless you like rich people.

Unhappy endings are just as important as happy endings. They’re an efficient way of transmitting vital Darwinian information. Your brain needs them to make maps of the world, maps that let you know what sorts of people and situations to avoid.

Knee-Jerk Irony: The tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation.

Sometimes you can't realize you're in a bad mood until another person enters your orbit.

I am aware that there is a world out there that functions without regard to me. There are wars and budgets and bombings and vast dimensions of wealth and greed and ambition and corruption. And yet I don't feel a part of that world, and I wouldn't know how to join if I tried.

Happy. And then I got afraid that it would vanish as quickly as it came. That it was accidental-- that I didn't deserve it. It's like this very, very nice car crash that never ends.

Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.

I think of how people can betray me simply by not caring enough to hide the fact of how little they care.I think of how the person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.

CONSENSUS TERRORISM:The process that decides in- office attitudes and behavior.

People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity.

Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.

The past is a finite resource.

BRAZILIFICATION:The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.

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

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

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

Telling people they look relaxed makes them look relaxed.

Quick. Name ten dead redheads.

It's weird when people start sentences with 'frankly' - as if their other sentences don't count.

Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be [email protected].

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

Once he entered my life, I promptly forgot all my years of putting on a brave face while browsing at bookstores until closing time, and of having one, two, three beers while watching crime shows and CNN. I completely forgot the hateful sensation of loneliness, like thirst and hunger together pressing on my stomach.

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.