Douglas Coupland Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. 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. Life After God

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

3. 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.

4. My arm draped her shoulder; we both felt safe, as if we were a complete solar system unto ourselves, dangling in the sky, warm heated planets inside a universe of stars.-Richard Girlfriend in a Coma

5. 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? All Families are Psychotic

6. Sometimes we all forget that the world itself is paradise, and there has been much of late to enourage that amnesia. (Microserfs, p 366) Microserfs

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

8. 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 it--a 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. Player One: What Is to Become of Us

9. ...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. The Gum Thief

10. 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, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal. The Gum Thief

11. 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. Player One: What Is to Become of Us

12. 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. Shampoo Planet

13. At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?-Richard Girlfriend in a Coma

14. 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.

15. Chronotropic Drugs:Drugs engineered to affect one's sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect. Player One: What Is to Become of Us

16. Is that all time is - our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass? Player One: What Is to Become of Us

17. It’s so hard to balance in our minds the knowledge that ‘the world’ is mundanely ‘a planet.’ The former is so holy; the latter merely a science project. Hey Nostradamus!

18. 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. Life After God

19. My arm draped her shoulder; we both felt safe, as if we were a complete solar system unto ourselves, dangling in the sky, warm heated planets inside a universe of stars.-Richard Girlfriend in a Coma

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