Douglas Coupland on Life

"When you're young you always feel that life hasn't yet begun...But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive."

"Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony."

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

"You wilfully ignore the small, gentle observations in life which you know are the most important."

"Doug's Law: "You can have information or you can have a life, but you can't have both."

"What's the point of being efficient if you're only leading an efficiently blank life?"

"As he ages and sees more of the world, he’s realizing that bad news is a part of life, and that when you have to give it, just say it and get it over with."

"Let's go out and buy a statistically average meal from a large multinational restaurant chain. That usually fixes about seventy-five percent of life's problems."

"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."

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

"Is feeling nothing the inevitable result of believing in nothing? ...I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything."

"Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a series of events — a story — and when we can’t figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow."

"We have to count. I want to be part of history. I want a Wikipedia page. I want Google hits. I don’t want to be just a living organism that comes and goes and leaves no trace on this planet."

"… after you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of Earth? … What moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet?"

"Meeting Anna-Louise was like finding a stranger's shopping list on the mall floor and realising there are other, more interesting diets than your own. It was the first time I ever felt incomplete."

"Being alive is just a brief technicality."

"Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy."

"Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives? How hard can it be to change gears and say, "You know what? Instead of inventing and telling stories, I’m going to make my life a more interesting story."

"Grandpa, like most of the fun-loving gang who built the Plants, just wanted to die or have his brain turn to oatmeal before it becomes too apparent exactly what a nightmare he and his buddies have saddled their descendants with."

"...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."

"I have this feeling watching Jasmine - that 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."

"Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures... And I think back over my life and I realize that my own nature -the core me- essentially hasn't changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five."

"“You feel chilled because you have no character. You’re a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you’re perpetually on the brink of being obsolete — whether it’s labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness. And it’s all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle. You’re glamorized drosophila flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim. If it isn’t a budget-driven eighteen-month game production schedule, it’s a five-year hardware obsolescence schedule. Every five years you have to throw away everything you know and learn a whole new set of hardware and software specs, relegating what was once critical to our lives to the cosmic slag heap."