Douglas Coupland
Canadian fiction writer and cultural commentator.
The two of you start talking about your feelings and your feelings float outside of you like vapors, and they mix together like a fog. Before you realize it, the two of you have become the same mist and you realize you can never return to being just a lone cloud again, because the isolation would be intolerable.
Vaccinated Time Travel: To fantasize about traveling backward in time, but only with proper vaccinations.
It can be really fun to go down with the ship.
The heart of a man is like deep water.
You worry that if you lower your guard, even for one second, your whole world will disintegrate into chaos.
You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.
"You're never too old to dance, Dad...and you're never too old to dream."
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard you say. Were you saying that with irony or for real?"
"'Is the hotel Marge? It has to be Marge. I want atmosphere.' Marge is Anna-Louise's word describing sad, 1950s-ish diner-type places where the waitresses are named Marge."
Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words.
We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age.
Life is dull, but it could be worse and it could be better. We accept that a corporation determines our life’s routines. It’s the trade-off so that we don’t have to be chronically unemployed creative types, and we know it. When we were younger, we’d at least make a show of not being fooled and leave copies of Adbusters on our desktops. After a few years it just doesn’t matter. You trawl for jokes or amusingly diversionary .wav files. You download music. A new project comes along, then endures a slow-motion smothering at the hands of meetings. All ideas feel stillborn. The air smells like five hundred sheets of paper.
And then it’s another day.
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?
You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog.
I think about how I think I know a person then 'poof!' I discover I only knew a cartoon version. Suddenly there's this fleshy, demanding, noisy creature in front of me, unknowable and just as lost as I am, and equally unable to remember that every soul in the world is hurting, not just themselves.
We are at the vanguard of adolescent protraction.
I don't want dainty little moments of insight ...
We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there's a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thogught we'd have a bowel movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better.
What is the one thing more than any other thing that makes one person different from any other person?
“What do lesbians have against capitalized letters?”
“Capitalization implies a hierarchy, that some letters are more special than others.”
All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.