Douglas Coupland Quotes - Page 8

But I guess the nice thing about driving a car is that the physical act of driving itself occupies a good chunk of brain cells that otherwise would be giving you trouble overloading your thinking. New scenery continually erases what came before; memory is lost, shuffled, relabeled and forgotten. Gum is chewed; buttons are pushed; windows are lowered and opened. A fast moving car is the only place where you're legally allowed to not deal with your problems. It's enforced meditation and this is good.

Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right.

Christmas makes everything twice as sad.

Here are some passing thoughts. Imagine looking up at the moon and seeing it burning. Imagine seeing the grocery store’s checkout girl grow horns. Imagine growing younger instead of older. Imagine feeling more powerful and more capable of falling in love with life every new day instead of being scared and sick and not knowing whether to stay under a sheet or venture forth into the cold.

As I'm never going to be old, I'm glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness.

When you are young, you always expect that the world is going to end. And then you get older and the world still chugs along and you are forced to re-evaluate your stance on the apocalypse as well as your own relationship to time and death. You realize that the world will indeed continue, with or without you, and the pictures you see in your head. So you try to understand the pictures instead.

Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.

And I think back over my own life and I realize that my own nature-the core me-essentially hasn’t changed all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel that same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.

My writing process is ritualized and monotonous, but there's no other way to get the job done. All other fiction writers I've met say the same thing.

In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness.

You fear that if you lower your guard for even one second your whole world will disintegrate into chaos

SAFETY NET-ISM: The belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life's hurts. Usually parents.

The world is a glorious place, and filled with so many unexpected moments that I'd get lumps in my throat, as though I were watching a bride walk down the aisle - moments as eternal and full of love as the lifting of veils, the saying of vows and the moment of the first wedded kiss.

Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.

I like the present. I'm always interested in new ideas, and what's happening. I'm not nostalgic.

Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave.

I'd take a helicopter up and throw microwave ovens down on the Taco Bell.

Las Vegas is a SimCity game gone horribly wrong.

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

The belief that tomorrow is a different place from today is certainly a unique hallmark of our species.

You can have information or you can have a life, but you can't have both.

People will always choose more money over more sex

All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.

If someone decides to be a musician now, it means because there is no hope of money at the end of it, it means they really want to be a musician. And if someone is writing now, there is no hope for money at the end of it.

Capitalization implies a hierarchy, that some letters are more special than others.