Doug Coupland Quotes (137 Quotes)

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

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.

A ring is a halo on your finger.

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.

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.

God is what keeps us together after the love is gone.

I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along.

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

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.

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.

Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.

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

If nothing else, we simply get used to being alive.

Good-looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters.

Once you see someone lose it, you can never look at them the same way again.

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.

Being asked what animal you'd like to be is a trick question; you're already an animal.

Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.

The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.

Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.

If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?

A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.

The universe hands you opportunities for a while, and if you don't take them, the universe says to itself, 'Oh I see, this person doesn't like opportunities' and stops giving them to you.

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

Forget about being world famous, it's hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.

Everybody has basically the same family, it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.

Make your goals big and broad enough so that they never become answered prayers and boomerang to curse you.

There's a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream.

Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.

Blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos.

Tofu hot dogs are actually scarier than real hot dogs. It's like wanting the worst possible meat product without even the thrill of it actually being meat.

We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but instead because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.

We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.

One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.

Where does personality end and brain damage begin?

Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.

What if God exists except it turns out he doesn't really like people very much?

It also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present, future or past, either.

A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.

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

If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil.

With Google I'm starting to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. People in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.

Technology favors horrible people.

Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.

I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.

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

Florida isn't so much a place where one goes to reinvent oneself, as it is a place where one goes if one no longer wished to be found.

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.

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

If cats were double the size they are now, they'd probably be illegal.