Famous Quotes

Quotes by Doug 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.
• Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.
• 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.
• Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.
• Christmas makes everything twice as sad.
• Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one's taking.
• Everybody has basically the same family, it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.
• 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.
• Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.
• Flying dreams mean that you're doing the right thing with your life.
• Forget about being world famous, it's hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.
• Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.
• Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.
• High school is such a shared experience in North American culture.
• 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.
• I know it's not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli?
• I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.
• 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.'
• 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.
• 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.
• If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.
• 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.
• If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you?
• If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.
• In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.
• It also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present, future or past, either.
• It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.
• Men won't read any email from a woman that's over 200 words long.
• 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.
• Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.
• People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.
• People will always choose more money over more sex.
• Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you.
• Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.
• Technology favors horrible people.
• The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.
• The future and eternity are two entirely different things.
• The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.
• 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.