802 Quotes by Douglas Coupland

Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they’ll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective. Sometimes I’d just like to mace them. I want to tell them that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for blindly handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear.

How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we knit together this place we call the world? Without stories our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It’s a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.

If you don’t change, then what’s the point of anything happening to you? It’ll still be happening to an unchanged person.

All systems have failed me. In five minutes I’ll be fine again for a while, but right now the inside of my head feels like Niagara Falls without the noise, just this mist and churning and no real sense of where earth ends and heaven begins.

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

And so the point of this story is that when I first met you at the photocopy machine, sure, we talked like a telethon and everything, but the perfume you were wearing then – that perfume was the smell of my stamp album, the smell of countries I always wanted to visit but never thought I’d be able to. It was like you had the world inside you.

Hasn’t it been a long time since you had a flying dream?

What’s a bar bill but a surtax on reality?

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