Best Quotes by Douglas Coupland (Top 10)
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Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.
Douglas Coupland
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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
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When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begunâthat "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidaysâwhenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was havingâthat interludeâthe scrambly madnessâall that time I had before?
Douglas Coupland
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I am going to give you a piece of advice... advice I wish I'd been told in guidance class back in high school, in between the don't-do-acid and don't-drink-and-drive films. I wish our counselors had told us, 'When you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you. It's called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don't. Here is the list of the symptoms, and don't worryâloneliness is the most universal sensation on the planet. Just remember one factâloneliness will pass. You will survive and you will be a better human for it.
Douglas Coupland
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Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity.
Douglas Coupland
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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
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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
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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
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One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.
Douglas Coupland
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Everybody has a âgripping stranger’ in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it’s the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the libraryâa stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying âDrop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,’ you’d follow them.
Douglas Coupland
More Douglas Coupland Quotes
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You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.
Douglas Coupland
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I thought about how odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no animal equivalent were smoking, body-building and writing. That's not much, considering how special we seem to think we are.
Douglas Coupland
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...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
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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
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How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we knit together this place we call the world? Without stories our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It's a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.
Douglas Coupland
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Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.
Douglas Coupland
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I am a quiet man. I tend to think things through and try not to say too much. But here I am, saying perhaps too much. But there are these feelings inside me which need badly to escape, I guess. And this makes me feel relieved because one of my big concerns these past few years is that I've been losing my ability to feel things with the same intensity- the way I felt when I was younger. It's scary- to feel your emotions floating away and just not caring. I guess what's really scary is not caring about the loss.
Douglas Coupland
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...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.
Douglas Coupland
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My mood has changed now. And the sun has gone behind the clouds. I'm in this mood I feel occasionally... this mood where there's a very good friend nearby who I should be phoning. If only I could reach that friend and talk, then everything would be just fine. The dilemma is, of course, I just don't know who that friend is. But in my heart I know my mood is merely me feeling disconnected from my true inner self.
Douglas Coupland
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You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog.
Douglas Coupland