If you’re looking for Douglas Coupland quotes about life, you’ve come to the right place. Here at Inspiring Lizard we collect thought-provoking quotes from interesting people. And in this article we share a list of the 17 most interesting quotes about life by Douglas Coupland. Let’s get inspired!
Douglas Coupland quotes about life
Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony.
— Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet
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.
— Douglas Coupland, Life After God
Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.
— Douglas Coupland
When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they’re locked into jobs they hate; that they’re broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they’re fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It’s profoundly depressing.
— Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?
— Douglas Coupland, All Families are Psychotic
A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age … pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don’t want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It’s universal.
— Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief
By the age of twenty, you know you’re not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you’re not going to be a dentist or any kind of professional. And by thirty, darkness starts moving in- you wonder if you’re ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy and successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you’re going to be doing for the rest of your life, and you become resigned to your fate……I mean, why do people live so long? What could be the difference between death at fifty-five and death at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five? Those extra years… what benefit could they possibly have? Why do we go on living even though nothing new happens, nothing new is learned, and nothing new is transmitted? At fifty-five, your story’s pretty much over.
— Douglas Coupland, Player One: What Is to Become of Us
…we’re told by TV and Reader’s Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change–and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.
— Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief
And then I felt sad because 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. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it’s already happened.
— Douglas Coupland, Life After God
I don’t think anyone ever gets over anything in life they merely get used to it.
— Douglas Coupland
Sometimes we all forget that the world itself is paradise, and there has been much of late to enourage that amnesia. (Microserfs, p 366)
— Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.
— Douglas Coupland, Life After God
You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they’re ever going to be.
— Douglas Coupland, Player One: What Is to Become of Us
People don’t have dominion over Nature. it’s gone beyond that. Human beings and the world are now the same thing. The future and whatever happens to you after you die – it’s all melted together. Death isn’t the escape hatch the way it used to be.
— Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma
I think of how people can betray me simply by not caring enough to hide the fact of how little they care.I think of how the person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.
— Douglas Coupland
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.
— Douglas Coupland
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
— Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma
Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment–that being alive is important, because just when you least expect it, you might receive exactly what you least expect.
— Douglas Coupland, Player One: What Is to Become of Us
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