Douglas Coupland

"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."

"...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."

"Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me."

"I'm trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition."

"What is the one thing more than any other thing that makes one person different from any other person?"

"...when you're in love, all of your doors are open, and all of their doors are open. And you roller-skate down your halls together."

"The two of you start talking about your feelings and your feelings float outside of you like vapors, and they mix together like a fog. Before you realize it, the two of you have become the same mist and you realize you can never return to being just a lone cloud again, because the isolation would be intolerable."

"I told Ethan that I speak in an unrestricted manner to animals—things like, aren't you just the cutest little kitty... that kind of thing, which I wouldn't dream of doing to humans. Then I realized I wish I could."

"I used to always think I had to have a reason to record my observations of the day, or even my emotions, but now I think simply being alive is more than enough reason."

"Language is such a technology."

"We are at the vanguard of adolescent protraction."

"Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers."

"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?"

"We had all awakened X number of years past our youth feeling sleazy and harsh. Choices still existed, but they were no longer infinite. Fun had become a scrim, concealing the hysteria that lay behind it."

"At 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 a professional... by thirty, a darkness starts moving in - you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful... by thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing the rest of your life; you become resigned to your fate."

"Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow."

"There's nothing at the center of what we do."

"Her friends have become who they've become by default. Their dreams are forgotten, or were never formulated to begin with."

"There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now."

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

"We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age."

"Scrape. Feel. Dig. Believe. Ask."

"Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs."

"If you're not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world - if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order - then you're wasting your day."

"A thousand years ago this wouldn’t have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids stand. One hundred years ago—or even fifty years ago—the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. The only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That’s why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It’s because Earth is now totally ours."

"If you want to get close to somebody, you have to tell him or her something intimate about yourself. They'll tell you something intimate in return, and if you keep this going, maybe you'll end up in love."

"People like that woman make it clear just how asinine it is to believe that human beings have some kind of in-built universal sense of goodness. These days I think that everybody's just one spit away from being a mall bomber."

"Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words."

"I was Cheryl Anway- that has to count for something."

"What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives."

"I hear that God has a really bad haircut."

"The heart of a man is like deep water."

"People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity. (from inside the cover)"

"The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I’m kidding. But killing helps."

"Don’t you get an empty feeling in your soul when you have a blank to-do list?"

"TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public."

"Nobody has ever been happy in a job they obtained by first handing in a resumé."

"If you’re an incredibly famous rich person who does more in one day than I do in a month, does your perception of time’s passing go slower or faster than it does for me?"

"“I have this theory about smart people. If you’re smart, you’re either the only person in your family who’s smart, or everybody in the family is smart. No in-between.” I considered this. “I think I come from the everybody’s smart category. But they don’t apply their smarts to… larger picture pursuits. That includes me.”"

"“To be merely good enough is to never succeed.”"

"Ethan, there has to be more to my life than this." "Why can't you just be happy as a shallow cartoon glyph of a human like everybody else here?"

"I have an idea. … If Ethan and Mark are so similar, we might as well arbitrarily assign them distinct personality traits. I know—Mark, from here on, you're to be called 'Evil Mark.'"

"Just go and feed yourselves on a wide array of products containing high-fructose corn sugar. Zheesh." "That wasn't funny, Evil Mark. It sounded fake and hollow. You're terrible at being ironic, and you've been rehearsing that line, haven't you?"

"“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.”"

"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."

"Comics day came and went. Another shoes day came and went. And another comics day followed that — the typical production and consumption cycles that help us survice our dismal, meaningless little lives."

"Ethan is annoyed with all of these dumb campaigns that indoctrinate millions of people into thinking they’re tough-guy free spirits when, in fact, there’s probably much to be said for following and, in any event, the food chain isn’t structured to encompass millions of non-followers."

"If you can control your emotions, chances are you don’t have too many."

"Only damaged people want good things to happen to them through visualization. They want something for nothing."

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