Doug Coupland Quotes | GloryQuotes

Doug Coupland Quotes About Life

Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.

I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along.

Only losers make decisions when things are bad. The time to rejig your life is the time when it's seemingly smooth.

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

Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.

Clowns drink to blot out the ravages of terrifying children for a living.

You can't get mad at weather because weather's not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life.

Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave.

Doug Coupland Quotes About Time

It also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present, future or past, either.

The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth, it's about the redistribution of time.

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.

On TV people look at your hair and then they look at your skin, and then they look at your clothes, and by the time they're listening to what you're saying, you're off the screen.

There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.

More Quotes by Doug Coupland

The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

The harder you try to become the opposite of your parents, the more quickly you become them.

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.

Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.

In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.

I want pills called September 10. You take one and your mind feels like the 11th never happened.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

High school is such a shared experience in North American culture.

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

Men won't read any email from a woman that's over 200 words long.

We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.

A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.

Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without.

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.

Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.

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.

Everybody has basically the same family, it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.

I know it's not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli?

If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.

Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.

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

Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.

Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?

There's nothing cure or funny or lovable about being cheap. It's a total turn-off.

It's weird when people start sentences with 'frankly' - as if their other sentences don't count.

Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler.

Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless people.

Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you.

What if God exists except it turns out he doesn't really like people very much?

There are three things we cry about in life, things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.

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.

Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.

Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine.

You can only fall in love six times in your life. Choose wisely.

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.

Good-looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters.

We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.

Make your goals big and broad enough so that they never become answered prayers and boomerang to curse you.

I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.

We're rapidly approaching a world comprised entirely of jail and shopping.

Browse 137 quotes attributed to Doug Coupland, listed in the source data as a Canadian Author, organized around themes such as Life, Time, Money. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.