01c. 1961 ADOne of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild-into its ancestral sea-its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never endDouglas Coupland / quote ↗
02c. 1961 ADAnd his computer's spell-check always forces him to capitalize the word "Internet". Come on; World War Two earned it's capitalization. The Internet just sucks human beings away from reality.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
03c. 1961 ADI hate math. It's hard, it's stupid, and it's nature's way of separating spinsters from women who end up breeding.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
04c. 1961 ADRick 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 / quote ↗
05c. 1961 ADJason once told me that eye contact is the most intimacy two people can have -- forget sex -- because the optic nerve is technically an extension of the brain, and when two people look into each other's eyes, it's brain-to-brain.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
06c. 1961 ADPost-adolescent Expert SyndromeThe tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure warriors who are willing to die with pleasure on the battlefield. Also the reason why religions recruit kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers almost exclusively from the 18-21 range. "Kyle, I never would have guessed that when you were up in your bedroom playing World of Warcraft all through your teens, you were, in fact, becoming an expert on the films of Jean-Luc Godard.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
07c. 1961 ADOkay, I know--my superpower--I'd be able to shoot lightening bolts out from my fingertips--great big knowledge network lightening bolts--and when a person was zapped by one of those bolts, they'd fall down on their knees and once on their knees, they'd be under water, in this place I saw once off the east coast of the Bahamas, a place where a billion electric blue fish swam up to me and made me a part of their school--and then they'd be up in the air, up in Manhattan, above the World Trade Center, with a flock of pigeons, flying amid the skyscrapers, and then--then what? And then they'd go blind, and then they'd be taken away--they'd feel homesick--more homesick than they'd felt in their entire life--so homesick they were throwing up--and they'd be abandoned, I don't know...in the middle of a harvested corn field in Missouri. And then they'd be able to see again, and from the edges of the field people would appear--everybody they'd known--and they'd be carrying Black Forest cakes and burning tiki lamps and boom boxes playing the same song, and they sky would turn into a sunset, the way it does in Walt Disney brochure, and the person I zapped would never be alone or isolated again.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
08c. 1961 ADFor many people, myself included, the end of the world is happening all the time! It is a form of criticality that paradoxically gives us hope for change and improvement.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
09c. 1961 ADFlying dreams mean that you're doing the right thing with your life.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
10c. 1961 ADEverybody past a certain age, regardless of how they look on the outside, pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
12c. 1961 ADIf a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
13c. 1961 ADBig companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
14c. 1961 ADSometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
15c. 1961 ADThe advent of cellphones may, in the end, be no more relevant than the ability of laptops to change our written documents into ones using cool new fonts.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
16c. 1961 ADI began doing writing projects and art and design projects to explore a new way of seeing Canada. Roots is one more way of continuing this exploration. I want to present a wide-open Canadian sense of color, adventure, communication and openness that defines our country.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
17c. 1961 ADI was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C's and D's. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
18c. 1961 ADTo have a healthy culture, you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don't have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
19c. 1961 ADI don't know how anyone gets anything done in cities. How can you live somewhere like London or New York, when there are 81 things to do every night? Awful. Give me solitude and space any time.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
20c. 1961 ADWriting is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
21c. 1961 ADI decided at 40 I was wasting entire chunks of my brain and didn't want to blow my one chance on Earth. I'm glad I made that decision. Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space. Sometimes, as with film, you can hybridize, but I think it's basically the space part of my brain wanting equal footing with the time part.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
23c. 1961 ADForget about being world famous, it's hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
24c. 1961 ADWe were never supposed to live until 40. We were built to self-destruct at 30, whether from cancer or mental illness. We're all going way beyond our expiration date.Douglas Coupland / quote ↗
