110+ Douglas Coupland Quotes On Education, Democracy And Futuristic

Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist, artist, and designer. He is best known for his 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which popularized terms such as "McJob" and "Generation X". He has written numerous novels, non-fiction books, and short stories that explore contemporary culture. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Douglas Coupland on leadership, education, democracy.

Top 10 Douglas Coupland Quotes

1. Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.
2. Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.
3. If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.
4. We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.
5. 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.
6. Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine.
7. When we constantly ask for miracles, we're unraveling the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would not be a world, it would be a cartoon.
8. The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth - it's about the redistribution of time.
9. Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.
10. Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.

Douglas Coupland Short Quotes

• Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.
• Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.
• Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.
• Adventure without risk is Disneyland.
• Every single moment is a coincidence.
• Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler.
• Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make.
• Good looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters.
• If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?
• You know what the best thing is about the end of the day? Tomorrow, it starts all over again.

Douglas Coupland Quotes About Life

Strange how when you're young you have no memories...Then one day you wake up and BOOM, memories overpower all else in your life, forever making the present moment seem sad and unable to compete with a glorious past that now has a life of its own. — Douglas Coupland

You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about by yourself. — Douglas Coupland

There are three things we cry for in life: things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent. — Douglas Coupland

Most people can't handle a structureless life. — Douglas Coupland

Figure out what it is in life you don't do well, and then don't do it. — Douglas Coupland

You can't get mad at weather because weather's not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life. — Douglas Coupland

Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity. — Douglas Coupland

Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin. — Douglas Coupland

In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as though we are spellcast. We speak in sentences that end before finishing. We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone. We bump into others and feel bashful at recognizing souls so similar to ourselves. — Douglas Coupland

I didn't realize then that so much of being adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience — Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland Quotes About Love

My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love. — Douglas Coupland

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

Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one's taking. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

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

...and when you meet someone and fall in love, and they fall in love with you, you ask them "Will you take my heart-- stains and all?" and they say "I will," and they ask you the same question and you say, "I will," too. — Douglas Coupland

God is what keeps us together after the love is gone. — Douglas Coupland

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? — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland Quotes About Feel

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. — Douglas Coupland

You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn't care. I guess that's what's scariest: not caring about the loss. — Douglas Coupland

I curled myself into a ball and cried quietly, doing that thing that only young people can do, namely, feeling sorry for myself. Once you're past thirty you lose that ability; instead of feeling sorry for yourself you turn bitter. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

I want pills called September 10. You take one and your mind feels like the 11th never happened. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

As you grow older, it becomes harder to feel 100 percent happy; you learn all the things that can go wrong, you become superstitious about tempting fate, about bringing disaster upon your life by accidentally feeling too good one day. — Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Douglas Coupland

I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and rename three o'clock 'Pepsi. — Douglas Coupland

Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel. The smell. Try and you can't. The brain doesn't process negatives. — Douglas Coupland

Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain. — Douglas Coupland

And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened. — Douglas Coupland

You guys just wait and see. We'll stand taller than these mountains. We'll bare open our hearts for the world to grab. We'll see lights where there was dimness. We'll testify together to what we have seen and felt. Life will go on--all of us--crawling; stumbling, falling perhaps. But we will be the strong ones. Our hearts will shine brightly. — Douglas Coupland

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

...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog. — Douglas Coupland

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

Salad bars are like a restaurant's lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy. — Douglas Coupland

Here's what I think: the five most unattractive traits in people are cheapness, clinginess, neediness, unwillingness to change and jealousy. Jealousy is the worst, and by far the hardest to conceal. — Douglas Coupland

Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes. — Douglas Coupland

The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything. — Douglas Coupland

There are few, if any, Canadian men that have never spelled their name in a snow bank. — Douglas Coupland

Gore is nature's way of saying, "There are too many human beings on the planet, and I'm trying to rectify this any way I can. SARS didn't work, but trust me, I'm cooking up something better. In the interim, please kill lots of yourselves. — Douglas Coupland

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations. — Douglas Coupland

what I remember is the silence in spite of the noise. In my head it might just as well have been a snowy day in the country. — Douglas Coupland

Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive. — Douglas Coupland

If God drives a car, He'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, with oxblood leather upholstery and an opera window. — Douglas Coupland

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car. — Douglas Coupland

Where does personality end and brain damage begin? — Douglas Coupland

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

Ten commandments yet seven deadly sins: conflict? — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

MID-TWENTIES BREAKDOWN: A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage. — Douglas Coupland

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

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. — Douglas Coupland

I have trouble with seafood because it tastes like a dock. — Douglas Coupland

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

I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it. — Douglas Coupland

It's never felt more Canadian to be Canadian than it does now. — Douglas Coupland

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

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

Telling people they look relaxed makes them look relaxed. — Douglas Coupland

The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be healing—a blanket—the comfort of a friend. Without at least some rain in any given day, or at least a cloud or two on the horizon, I feel overwhelmed by the information of sunlight and yearn for the vital, muffling gift of falling water. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

PERSONALITY TITHE: A price paid for becoming a couple; previously amusing human beings become boring: 'Thanks for inviting us, but Noreen and I are going to look at flatware catalogs tonight. Afterward we're going to watch the shopping channel. — Douglas Coupland

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now. — Douglas Coupland

Thinking you're immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal. — Douglas Coupland

At least there's nothing scary about him and hopefully he doesn't see anything scary in me. We go way back, to summer camp. We KNOW each other. People I don't know just make me want to say YIKES! I'll take history over mystery any day of the week. — Douglas Coupland

There's nothing at the center of what we do...No center. It doesn't exist. All of us-look at our lives: We have an acceptable level of affluence. We have entertainment. We have a relative freedom from fear. But there's nothing else. — Douglas Coupland

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

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

Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries. — Douglas Coupland

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. — Douglas Coupland

The real killers in the business world aren't the ones who aim for the top, it's the ones who aim for two notches below the top. — Douglas Coupland

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

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. — Douglas Coupland

Chronocanine Envy: Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, "Life must be lived forward. — Douglas Coupland

Nobody cares about worthiness. People care about what is real inside of you. — Douglas Coupland

With the first drink comes the truth, with the second drink comes wishful thinking, and with the third drink come the lies. — Douglas Coupland

I say ‘Uhmm...’ a lot. I mentioned this to Karla and she says it’s a CPU word. It means you’re assembling data in your head - spooling. — Douglas Coupland

Jason said, "Yes. Gerard T. Giraffe." What does the 'T' stand for?" 'The. — Douglas Coupland

You've seen what you've seen; you've felt what you've felt. Ideology is for people who don't trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world. — Douglas Coupland

The heart of a man is like deep water — Douglas Coupland

So much information lacks a good way to store it, especially when it's all digital; sometimes it requires old technology to go back and retrieve it. — Douglas Coupland

Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you. — Douglas Coupland

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

Life Lessons by Douglas Coupland

1. Douglas Coupland's work often explores the complexities of modern life, reminding us to take the time to appreciate the small moments and to remain mindful of the interconnectedness of all things.
2. Through his stories, Coupland encourages us to be open to new experiences and to embrace our individual identities.
3. He also reminds us to be mindful of our impact on the world, and to take responsibility for our actions and their consequences.