Douglas Coupland: I think that every reader on earth has a list of che...

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

Douglas Coupland

lonely loneliness life

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

Douglas Coupland

novelists caring real

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

knowing matter people

MID-TWENTIES BREAKDOWN: A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.

Douglas Coupland

inability twenties school

There's a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream.

Douglas Coupland

manageable dream said

Figure out what it is in life you don't do well, and then don't do it.

Douglas Coupland

profession wells figures

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 one moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet? What's your takeaway? 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.

Douglas Coupland

elephants white memories

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

Douglas Coupland

three two interesting

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

plot waiting doe

Strange how when you're young you have no memories...Then one day you wake up and BOOM, memories overpower all else in your life, forever making the present moment seem sad and unable to compete with a glorious past that now has a life of its own.

Douglas Coupland

forever memories past

When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun—that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?

Douglas Coupland

holiday next-week years

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

sadness depression life

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.

Douglas Coupland

rocks clouds water

It's not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments.

Douglas Coupland

live-life healthy littles

...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

pain ideas thinking

Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity.

Douglas Coupland

fake creativity three

I am a quiet man. I tend to think things through and try not to say too much. But here I am, saying perhaps too much. But there are these feelings inside me which need badly to escape, I guess. And this makes me feel relieved because one of my big concerns these past few years is that I've been losing my ability to feel things with the same intensity- the way I felt when I was younger. It's scary- to feel your emotions floating away and just not caring. I guess what's really scary is not caring about the loss.

Douglas Coupland

caring loss past

My mood has changed now. And the sun has gone behind the clouds. I'm in this mood I feel occasionally... this mood where there's a very good friend nearby who I should be phoning. If only I could reach that friend and talk, then everything would be just fine. The dilemma is, of course, I just don't know who that friend is. But in my heart I know my mood is merely me feeling disconnected from my true inner self.

Douglas Coupland

good-friend clouds heart

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

Douglas Coupland

doe adventure needs

I didn't realize then that so much of being adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience

Douglas Coupland

youth adults feelings

I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints... I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does.