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Douglas Coupland

133 quotes

“Why are we drinking Zima? It’s beyond irony. It’s not funny or anything. It’s just gross. Why not just serve us jugs of Hitler’s piss instead?” “Drinking Zima is something Douglas Coupland would make a character do.” “To what end?” “It’d be a device that would allow him to locate the characters in time and a specific sort of culture.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A girl can’t control who will and who won’t fall in love with her, Ethan. And sometimes, when a nuisance person falls in love with you, it can be awfully… awkward.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wish my parents took good care of their grow-op.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we’ve started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It turns out 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. I can’t imagine anything worse than that. Okay, maybe I can, but imagine reading the morning newspaper and believing it all to be true on some level.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You're never too old to dance, Dad...and you're never too old to dream." "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard you say. Were you saying that with irony or for real?”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What do lesbians have against capitalized letters?” “Capitalization implies a hierarchy, that some letters are more special than others.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hip flasks are the juice machines of the alcohol world — everyone has one and it never gets used.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let's go out and buy a statistically average meal from a large multinational restaurant chain. That usually fixes about seventy-five percent of life's problems.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was wondering what electrons are actually doing when they sit in your hard drive in an old laptop at the back of your closet. I mean, how does an electron sit still — is it like a cartoon M&M learning back in a folding beach chair? Is it like an angry little steel ball bearing hovering there, just waiting to go nuts on protons? What’s the mechanism that starts and stops the electron? Who’s its dungeon master?”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hang on a second—you already have my old laptop. Why do you want my new drives so badly?" "Because my contract says I have to write a book, and it's much easier just to steal your life than to make something up.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yesirree, life sure is good. Yesirree, nothing could possibly go wrong with everything being so good. But of course, in books, good is boring. Good is a snoozer. Good makes people close the covers and never reopen them. But you know—you'd think that just once when life finally started going my way, that cosmic writer out there would allow me and all of my co-characters to simply enjoy things for just a little while. I mean, what kind of a prick would end a book just when everything's going so well?”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media might do us all such tremendous favours when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much as the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Syracuse University commencement address, May 8, 1994 [Source of the book's title]”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fame without the money to insulate you from it is one of the most wretched human conditions possible. (p. 80)”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“SOLON CR is indicated for the short-term treatment of psychological unease grounded in obsession with thinking about the near and distant future. By severing the link between the present moment and a patient’s perceived future state, researchers have found a pronounced and significant drop in all forms of anxiety. As well, researchers have found that disengagement with “the future” has allowed many patients complaining of persistent loneliness to live active and productive single lives with no fear or anxiety. (p. 95)”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The hardest things in the world are being unique and having your life be a story. In the old days, it was much easier, but our modern fame-driven culture, with its real-time 24-7 marinade of electronic information, demands a lot from modern citizens, and poses great obstacles to narrative.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Truly modern citizens are both charismatic and can only respond to other people with charisma. To survive, people need to become self-branding charisma robots. Yet, ironically, society mocks and punishes people who aspire to that state.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was a fifteen-second patch of silence, then Craig said, 'Isn't it weird that Hotmail accounts still exist?' 'It really is,' said Bev. (p. 222)”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Finally, my life was a story. My days would no longer feel like a video game that resets to zero every time I wake up, and then begs for coins. (p. 143)”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Being alive is just a brief technicality. (p. 167)”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives? How hard can it be to change gears and say, "You know what? Instead of inventing and telling stories, I’m going to make my life a more interesting story." (p. 177)”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Doug's Law: "You can have information or you can have a life, but you can't have both.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have to count. I want to be part of history. I want a Wikipedia page. I want Google hits. I don’t want to be just a living organism that comes and goes and leaves no trace on this planet.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unlike Rachel, Player One has a complete overview both of the world and of time. Player One’s life is more like a painting than it is a story. Player One can see everything with a glance and can change tenses at will. Player One has ultimate freedom, the ultimate software on the ultimate hardware. That realm is also the one place where Player One feels, for lack of a better word, normal.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a series of events — a story — and when we can’t figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there's a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thought we'd have a bowel movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A thousand years ago this wouldn’t have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids stand. One hundred years ago—or even fifty years ago—the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. The only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That’s why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It’s because Earth is now totally ours.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You feel chilled because you have no character. You’re a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you’re perpetually on the brink of being obsolete — whether it’s labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness. And it’s all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle. You’re glamorized drosophila flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim. If it isn’t a budget-driven eighteen-month game production schedule, it’s a five-year hardware obsolescence schedule. Every five years you have to throw away everything you know and learn a whole new set of hardware and software specs, relegating what was once critical to our lives to the cosmic slag heap.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Older staffers don’t even bother coming in on weekends. Where is the sleep-crazed, Pepsi-fuelled one-point-oh tech environment that can only be created by having no green vegetables, no sex and no life? Cowboy said, “I miss the greed of the 1990s bubble.” John Doe said, “I miss the possibility of unearned wealth.” Bree said, “I miss the possibility of doing something Apple, something one-point-oh.” Evil Mark said, “I miss people having Hot Wheels tracks set up in their cubicles.” Gord-O walked into the pod. “You can’t miss the nineties, because you weren’t there. They were great. Too bad you screwed-up twits missed out on the party.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was in a testy mood. I’d been inside my head all day — some days that just happens. You get lost doing just one task, and suddenly you look up and it’s dark out, but you still don’t want to leave your headspace, and the she comes up behind you with a 150 KHz marine emergency blow horn and lets off one big parp that has you shitting out your eyes, ears, and nostrils, and when you turn around, you discover that your evil co-workers were videoing the entire prank, and you get furious and you scream for everybody to fuck off and die. “Aw shucks, it was only a joke,” but the fact remains that because of that one loud parp you’ll never be able to parse C++ code again because you fried those dendrites that dictate logic patterns, and in a flash you see yourself as a future object of pity, forced to work at a TacoTime outlet, feeding disrespectful larvae of the middle classes while taking soiled orange PVC trash bags out to the back alley, where you see a grease storage drum, and wistfully remember that earlier, more charmed portion of your life when you once knew the chemicals and procedures necessary to convert restaurant grease into clean-burning planet-friendly ethanol, and that was just one of the many feats your brain was capable of, back before the parping, back before people whispered when they saw you walking their way, hoping they wouldn’t have to make small talk with you, back before they dumbed themselves down to the verbal level of Pebbles Flintstone to make you understand them.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know what? When you read a book, you’re totally lost in your own private world, and society says that’s a good and wonderful thing. But if you play a game by yourself, it’s this weird, fucked-up, socially damaging activity. In my neighbourhood, all the teenage boys are dying because they’re driving their cars using videogame physics instead of real-world physics. They turn too quickly and change lanes too quickly. They don’t understand traction or centripetal force. And they’re dropping like flies. Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What — suddenly you’ve magically turned into Noam Chomsky? Don’t discuss Sony like it’s a great big benevolent cartoon character who lives next door to Astro Boy. Like any company, Sony is comprised of individuals who are fearful for their jobs on a daily basis, and who make lame decisions based pretty much on fear and conforming to social norms — but then, that’s every corporation on earth, so don’t single out one specific corporation as lovable and cute. They’re all evil and greedy. They’re all sort of in the moral middle ground, where good and bad cancel each other out, so there’s nothing really there — which, in it’s own way, far darker than any paranoid or patriarchal theory of Sony. Here’s a much simpler example of geeks and neural processing malfunctions: Has anybody experienced a geek environment in which said geeks wear perfume or deodorant? Chances are no. While advanced microautistics are more commonly men than women, both share a marked dislike of scent.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is dull, but it could be worse and it could be better. We accept that a corporation determines our life’s routines. It’s the trade-off so that we don’t have to be chronically unemployed creative types, and we know it. When we were younger, we’d at least make a show of not being fooled and leave copies of Adbusters on our desktops. After a few years it just doesn’t matter. You trawl for jokes or amusingly diversionary .wav files. You download music. A new project comes along, then endures a slow-motion smothering at the hands of meetings. All ideas feel stillborn. The air smells like five hundred sheets of paper. And then it’s another day.”
Douglas Coupland (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source