Quote

What exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human? There has to be something. How odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people.

Douglas Coupland

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Douglas Coupland
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: December 30
Artist
Designer
Fashion Designer
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Sculptor
Writer
Douglas Campbell Coupland
Sure
Makes
Human
Specifically
Humans
Odd
Something
Billions
Really
Exactly
People
Quite
Alive

More quotes by Douglas Coupland

Image
ETHNOMAGNETISM: The tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods: 'You wouldn't understand it there, mother - they hug where I live now.'
Douglas Coupland
Image
NOSTALGIA IS A WEAPON
Douglas Coupland
Image
Most people can't handle a structureless life.
Douglas Coupland
Image
If someone decides to be a musician now, it means because there is no hope of money at the end of it, it means they really want to be a musician. And if someone is writing now, there is no hope for money at the end of it.
Douglas Coupland
Image
Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective.
Douglas Coupland
Image
I think writing would have happened to me anyway, somehow. Differently, but it still would have happened.
Douglas Coupland
Image
...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
Image
You can't fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.
Douglas Coupland
Image
Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
Douglas Coupland
Image
Figure out what it is in life you don't do well, and then don't do it.
Douglas Coupland
Image
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
Image
There's nothing cute or funny or lovable about being cheap. It's a total turn-off.
Douglas Coupland
Image
It'd be preposterous for me to propose a universal cure to loneliness but I will say that people who do the things they find interesting, either creatively or vocationally, tend to become unlonely very quickly.
Douglas Coupland
Image
You guys just wait and see. We'll stand taller than these mountains. We'll bare open our hearts for the world to grab. We'll see lights where there was dimness. We'll testify together to what we have seen and felt. Life will go on--all of us--crawling stumbling, falling perhaps. But we will be the strong ones. Our hearts will shine brightly.
Douglas Coupland
Image
The new world lies before her eyes like an opened chest of treasure, a flock of birds over Africa, a thousand TVs all playing at once.
Douglas Coupland
Image
Every single moment is a coincidence.
Douglas Coupland
Image
I'm an adult. Discipline me and I'll bury you alive. - Roger
Douglas Coupland
Image
Chronocanine Envy: Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, Life must be lived forward.
Douglas Coupland
Image
I think, there are people for whom freedom is a bigger, more important thing than stability.
Douglas Coupland
Image
I am aware that there is a world out there that functions without regard to me. There are wars and budgets and bombings and vast dimensions of wealth and greed and ambition and corruption. And yet I don't feel a part of that world, and I wouldn't know how to join if I tried.
Douglas Coupland