Douglas Coupland

“When you get an e-mail and reply to the sender, you simply obliterate everything they sent you and then, in small square brackets, write: [deletia] It stands for everything that's been lost.”

“People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that's always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge you're free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else.”

“One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.”

“He felt intact but worthless, like a chocolate rabbit selling for 75 percent off the month after Easter.”

“If nothing else, we simply get used to being alive.”

“Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a sequence of events - a story - and when we can't figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow.”

“Sólo el individuo que vive en soledad es una criatura sujeta a leyes profundas y si sale al empezar la mañana, o mira hacia la tarde que está vibrante de vida y comprende lo que le rodea, entonces todo se desprende de él, como si de un cadáver se tratara, aunque siga en la plenitud de la vida.”

“And yet in the end did we ever really give each other completely to the other? Do either of us even know how to really share ourselves? Imagine the house is on fire and I reach to save one thing - what is it? Do you know? Imagine that I am drowning and I reach within myself to save that one memory which is me - what is it? Do you know? What things would either of us reach for? Neither of us know. After all these years we just wouldn't know.”

“Yet how often is it that we are rescued by a stranger, if ever at all? And how is it that our lives can become drained of the possibility of forgiveness and kindness - so drained that even one small act of mercy becomes a potent lifelong memory? How do our lives reach these points?”

“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.”

“This is not ambition. This is desperation.”

“Anna-Louise leans over and whispers in my ear. "This is so surreal," she says, "I think I'm turning into a melting clock.”

“As brothers and sister we knew instinctively that if we were going to stand in darkness, best we stand in a darkness we had made ourselves.”

“What one moment from you defines what it’s like to be alive on this planet. What’s your takeaway?’’There is silence. Tobias doesn’t get her point, and frankly, neither do I. She continues: ‘’Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don’t count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you’re really alive.”

“But Dag, for all of his efforts, might as well have been talking to a cat. Our parents’ generation seems neither able nor interested in understanding how marketers exploit them. They take shopping at face value.”

“I wonder that all things seem to be from hell these days: dates, jobs, parties, weather…Could the situation be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised heaving in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can’t help but suffer in comparison.”

“Microserfs (1995) p28 'He's thinking of quitting [Microsoft] to be a pixelation broker, going around to museums to digitize their paintings”

“Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style- everyone's too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the '90s.”

“Okay, I know--my superpower--I'd be able to shoot lightening bolts out from my fingertips--great big knowledge network lightening bolts--and when a person was zapped by one of those bolts, they'd fall down on their knees and once on their knees, they'd be under water, in this place I saw once off the east coast of the Bahamas, a place where a billion electric blue fish swam up to me and made me a part of their school--and then they'd be up in the air, up in Manhattan, above the World Trade Center, with a flock of pigeons, flying amid the skyscrapers, and then--then what? And then they'd go blind, and then they'd be taken away--they'd feel homesick--more homesick than they'd felt in their entire life--so homesick they were throwing up--and they'd be abandoned, I don't know...in the middle of a harvested corn field in Missouri. And then they'd be able to see again, and from the edges of the field people would appear--everybody they'd known--and they'd be carrying Black Forest cakes and burning tiki lamps and boom boxes playing the same song, and they sky would turn into a sunset, the way it does in Walt Disney brochure, and the person I zapped would never be alone or isolated again.”

“You know, Dag and Claire smile a lot, as do many people I know. But I always wondered if there is something either mechanical or malignant to their smiles, for the way they keep their outer lips propped up seems a bit, not false, but protective. A minor realization hits me as I sit with the two of them. It is the realisation that the smiles that they wear in their daily lives are the same as the smiles worn by people who have been good-naturedly fleeced, but fleeced nonetheless, in public and on a New York sidewalk by card sharks, and who are unable because of social conventions to show their anger, who don't want to look like poor sports.”

“With the first drink comes the truth, with the second drink comes wishful thinking, and with the third drink come the lies.”

“Now Karen wants a pill that will make the whole twenty-first century disappear - that will make this unavoidable future vanish. Dr Yamato said that earth was not built for six billion people, all running around and being passionate about being alive. Earth was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.”

“I don't think human beings were meant to know so much about the world. All this time and all thisexposure to every conceivable aspect of life - wisdom so rarely enters the picture. We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and thenwe become bitter and isolated as we age.”

“I thought I was going to see God or reach an epiphany or to levitate or something. But I never did. I prayed so long for that tohappen. I think maybe I didn't surrender myself enough - I think that's the term: surrender. I still wanted to keep a foot in both worlds. And then thispast year I've still been waiting for the same bigcosmic moments, and still nothing's happened...”

“How many of us have a love so true it spans eternity? A purity of need so clear it can remain strong in the face of all that the world throws at us? Thisis Karen Ann McNeil, the woman who fell to Earth, the woman for whom the people in her life never gave up waiting.”

“I believe that what separates humanity from everything else in this world – spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss, and Mount McKinley – is that humanity alone has the capacity at any given moment to commit all possible sins.” --Hey Nostradamus!”

“[...] and it was like the universe had suddenly turned itself off and the world was almost holy, like life was suddenly religious, but good religious, and suddenly everyone became the best version of themselves.”

“Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.”

“Question: would I do it the same way all over again? Absolutely - because I learned something along the way. Most people don't learn things alongthe way. Or if they do, they conveniently forget those things when it suits their need. Most people, given a second chance, fuck it up completely. It'sone of those laws of the universe that you can't shake. People, I have noticed, only seem to learn once they get their third chance - after losing andwasting vast sums of time, money, youth, and energy you name it. But still they learn, which is the better thing in the end.”

“I walked far down a dirt side road and into a farmer's field - some sort of cereal that was chest high and corn green and rustled as its blades inflicted small paper burns on my skin as I walked through them. And in that field, when the appointed hour, minute, and second of the darkness came, I lay myself down on the ground, surrounded by the tall pithy grain stalks and the faint sound of insects, and held my breath, there experiencing a mood that I have never really been able to shake completely - a mood of darkness and inevitability and facination - a mood that surely must have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out.”

“In my ears i hear a noise, and this noise is the sound of the color of the sun.”

“Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.”

“The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I’m kidding. But killing helps.”

“It starts out young - you try not to be different just to survive - you try to be just like everyone else - anonymity becomes reflexive - and then one day you wake up and you've *become* all those other people - the others - the something you aren't. And you wonder if you can ever be what you really *are*. Or you wonder if it's too late to find out.”

“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”

“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”

“And then suddenly I realized that I was feeling- well, that I was actually feeling. My old personality was, after months of pills and pleasant nothingness, returning. Just the littlest bit- for I had only stopped taking my little yellow pills the day before- but my essence was already asserting itself, however weakly at this point. I felt a lump in my throat, and I spent the rest of the day walking around this strange and beautiful city, remembering myself, what it used to feel like to be me, before I switched myself off, before I stopped listening to my inner voices.”

“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.”

“For there was once a time when we expected the worst. But then the worst happened, did it not? And so we will never be surprised ever again.”

“Some day you cross this thin line and you really realize that we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.”

“I had been feeling permanently on the cusp of a flu, feeling at that point where I just wanted to borrow somebody else's coat- borrow somebody else's life- their aura. I seemed to have lost the ability to create any more aura on my own.”

“Mphhh... What did you say Tyler?' Anna-Louise mumbles on the bed above me.I stand up, and a tame blue bird lands on my shoulder and tries to nibble my earlobe. I gently shake Anna-Louise fully awake. 'Anna-Louise, wake-up,' I say. 'Wake up--the world is alive.”

“I then return to my seat and something happens to me-- something inside me is exhausted and worn and stops spinning and I break down and cry.I cry because the future has once again found its sparkle and grown a million times larger. And I cry because... of how badly I behaved during my own personal Dark Ages-- back before I had a future and someone who cared for me from above. It is like today the sky opened up and only now am I allowed to enter.”

“You will see the effects of dark secrets making themselves known-- via their minds and bodies and via the stories your friends...will begin telling you...The only payback for all of this-- for the conversion of their once-young hearts into tar--will be that you will love your friends more, even though they have made you see the universe as an emptier and scarier place...”

“I sit on the steps in the heat of the sun and listen as one by one these car alarms extinguish themselves until once more only the muted roar of the city is audible, and the city, bathed in sunlight, once again resumes dreaming its collective dream.Cars roll down the city's roads, plants grow from its soil, wealth is generated in its rooms, hope is created and lost and recreated in the minds and souls of its inhabitants, and the city continues its dream and searches for those ideas that will make it strong.”

“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.”

“You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about yourself.”

“You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog.”

“You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.”

“You don't believe magic is possible in lives lived within traditional boundaries.”