Quotes of Douglas Coupland - somelinesforyou

“ Here’s my theory about meetings and life; the three things you can’t fake are erections, competence and creativity. That’s why meetings become toxic they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be. And the more effort they put into concealing their inabilities, the more toxic the meeting becomes. One of the most common creativity-faking tactics is when someone puts their hands in prayer position and conceals their mouth while they nod at you and say, 'Mmmmmm. Interesting.' If pressed, they’ll add, 'I’ll have to get back to you on that.' Then they don’t say anything else. ”

- 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

“ All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family – it’s just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next. ”

- Douglas Coupland

“ Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony. ”

- 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

“ Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony. ”

- Douglas Coupland

“ Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy. ”

- Douglas Coupland

“ My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments—we hear a word that sticks in our mind—or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly—we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen—or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station. And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection—certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether; one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real—this clunky daytoday world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true storymaking events of our lives. ”

- Douglas Coupland

“ 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

“ When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they’re locked into jobs they hate; that they’re broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they’re fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It’s profoundly depressing. ”

- Douglas Coupland

“ She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living? ”

- Douglas Coupland

“ We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die. ”

- Douglas Coupland

“ TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public. ”

- Douglas Coupland

“ I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts. ”

- Douglas Coupland

“ A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, AnnMargret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal. ”

- Douglas Coupland

“ ...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal changeand 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

“ Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God I think that He created an order for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles, we're also asking that He unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world. ”

- Douglas Coupland

“ You should be spreading the good word. You should be etching the good word onto the glass scanning beds of library photocopiers. You should be scraping the truth onto old auto parts and throwing them off bridges so that people digging in the mud in a million years will question the world, too. You should be carving eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe soles so that your every trail speaks of thinking and faith and belief. You should be designing molecules that crystallize into poems of devotion. You should be making bar codes that print out truth, not lies. You shouldn't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has the truth stamped on ita demand for people to reach a finer place! ...Your new life will be tinged with urgency, as though you're digging out the victims of an avalanche. If you're not spending every waking moment of your life living the truth, if you're not plotting every moment to boil the carcass of the old order, then you're wasting your day. ”

- Douglas Coupland

“ 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

“ She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living? ”

- Douglas Coupland

“ I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts. ”

- 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

“ 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

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

- Douglas Coupland

“ Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster. ”

- 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

“ Dimanchophobia: Fear of Sundays, not in a religious sense but rather, a condition that reflects fear of unstructured time. Also known as acalendrical anxiety. Not to be confused with didominicaphobia, or kyriakephobia, fear of the Lord's Day. Dimanchophobia is a mental condition created by modernism and industrialism. Dimanchophobes particularly dislike the period between Christmas and New Year's, when days of the week lose their significance and time blurs into a perpetual Sunday. Another way of expressing dimanchophobia might be "life in a world without calendars." A popular expression of this condition can be found in the pop song "Every Day is Like Sunday," by Morrissey, in which he describes walking on a beach after a nuclear way, when every day of the week now feels like Sunday. ”

- Douglas Coupland

“ We can no longer create the feeling of an era...of time being particular to one spot in time. ”

- Douglas Coupland

“ Is that all time is our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass? ”

- Douglas Coupland

“ And the reason Luke is thinking about time and free will is because he believes that money is the closest human beings have ever come to crystallizing time and free will into a compact physical form. Cash. Cash is a time crystal. Cash allows you to multiply your will, and it allows you to speed up time. Cash is what defines us as a species. Nothing else in the universe has money. ”

- Douglas Coupland
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