Douglas Coupland
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.Collection: People
People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity.Collection: People
...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.Collection: Way
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.Collection: War
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.Collection: Caring
I think writing would have happened to me anyway, somehow. Differently, but it still would have happened.Collection: Writing
I build my life so that I don't wake up for anything. Ever. If you make me get up early to do something with you, I will hate you and resent you and figure out a way of never having to work with you ever again.Collection: Hate
I like having a beard. My beard changes my face shape and allows me to see in it family members who I love and can't see otherwise.Collection: Shapes
I find people who prejudge reality TV to be annoying. Art comes from anywhere. Culture can ooze out of any crack. Prejudging is the death of creativity.Collection: Art
I want to see books taken out of historical time and placed into a different timeline, such as evolutionary or geological time, as a means of putting the human experience in context.Collection: Taken
I think individual people are interesting, not really groups of people.Collection: Thinking
Discussions of generations only go downhill. There's no point in having them.Collection: Generations
It's just amazing how hard it is for people to change, even when amazing things happen. It almost reinforces who you are instead of making you change.Collection: People
TV is all about hair. And then skin. And then clothing. And then it's about your voice. And finally the report, what you're actually saying. And 99 times out of 100, it never gets past the hair.Collection: Past
Vaccinated Time Travel: To fantasize about traveling backward in time, but only with proper vaccinations.Collection: Time
You really have to wonder why we even bother to get up in the morning. I mean, really: Why work? Simply to buy more stuff?Collection: Morning
What is prayer but a wish for the events in your life to string together to form a story -- something that makes some sense of events you know have meaning.Collection: Prayer
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?Collection: Years
It is indeed a mistake to confuse children with angelsCollection: Children
Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make.Collection: Letting Go
Anyway, I want to remember that love can happen. Because there is life after not having a life. I never expected love to happen. What was I expecting from life, then?Collection: Want
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.Collection: Past
STRANGELOVE REPRODUCTION: Having children to make up for the fact that one no longer believes in the future.Collection: Children
It's starts out young- you try not be different just to survive- you try to be just like everyone else- anonymity becomes reflexive- and then one day you wake up and you've become all those other people- the others- the something you aren't. And you wonder if you can ever be what it is you really are. Or you wonder if it's too late to find out.Collection: People
Later, I would learn that coincidences are the most planned things in the world. Later, I would learn that every single moment is a coincidence.Collection: World
Sometimes you accidentally input an extra digit into the year: i.e, 19993 and you add 18,000 years on to *now*, and you realize that the year 19993 will one day exist and that time is a scary thing, indeed.Collection: Years
Besides, animals don’t even have time. Only humans have time. It’s what makes us different.Collection: Animal
And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.Collection: Morning
Dreams don't come true. Dreams die. Dreams get compromised. Dreams end up dealing meth in a booth at the back of the Olive Garden. Dreams choke to death on bay leaves. Dreams get spleen cancer.Collection: Dream
What's a bar bill but a surtax on reality?Collection: Reality
Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you.Collection: Quiet People
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.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: World
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.Collection: Trying
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.Collection: War
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.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Jobs
In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness.Collection: Way
You fear that if you lower your guard for even one second your whole world will disintegrate into chaosCollection: World
SAFETY NET-ISM: The belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life's hurts. Usually parents.Collection: Hurt
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.Collection: Wedding
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.Collection: Memories
I like the present. I'm always interested in new ideas, and what's happening. I'm not nostalgic.Collection: Ideas
I'd take a helicopter up and throw microwave ovens down on the Taco Bell.Collection: Taco Bell
Las Vegas is a SimCity game gone horribly wrong.Collection: Vegas
And in his heart, I think, he's now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I've said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world.Collection: Sweet
A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age - regardless of how they look on the outside - pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.Collection: Birthday
Everyone has a special place they store their tension (I'm on shiatsu duty), the same way everyone misspells the same words over and over. Karla stores her tension in her rhomboid muscles, and I remove it. This is making me feel good. That I can do this.Collection: Pain
I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom.Collection: Lying