Douglas Coupland

“Is that all time is - our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass?”

“The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.”

“Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.”

“Chronotropic Drugs:Drugs engineered to affect one's sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect.”

“You can't fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.”

“I don't know if it's a very smart idea to admire the living.”

“The neighborhood I grew up in had this fence that surrounds the watershed. And if you go on the other side of that fence, there's nothing until the North Pole and down to Siberia. It's the absolute cutoff point between man and nature.”

“Technology favors horrible people.”

“It had been drilled into us that to feel fear is to not fully trust God. Whoever made that up has never been beneath a cafeteria table with a tiny thread of someone else's blood trickling onto their leg.”

“I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice.”

“Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive.”

“Anti-sabbatical: A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions”

“I will say that my days are spent solitary and somewhat lost in thought, and every single time I inadvertently wear my shirt inside out in public, I bump into my sister-in-law at the grocery store.”

“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.”

“When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.”

“Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one's taking.”

“I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and rename three o'clock 'Pepsi.'”

“With 'Worst. Person. Ever.' I knew where it started and where it had to end, but I threw Raymond as many curveballs as I could along the way. He's like the coyote in the 'Road Runner' cartoons.”

“I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom.”

“Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.”