A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.

— Douglas Coupland

A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are anymore. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal.

— Douglas Coupland

Aliens didn't come down to Earth and give us technology. We invented it ourselves. Therefore, it can never be alienating it can only be an expression of our humanity.

— Douglas Coupland

All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.

— Douglas Coupland

And his computer's spell-check always forces him to capitalize the word "Internet". Come on; World War Two earned its capitalization. The Internet just sucks human beings away from reality.

— Douglas Coupland

And in his heart, I think, he's now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I've said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world.

— Douglas Coupland

And once again, work is providing us with a comforting sense of normalcy-living and working inside of coding's predictably segmented time/space. Simply grinding away at something makes life feel stable, even though the external particulars of life (like our pay checks, our office, and so forth) are, at best, random.

— Douglas Coupland

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

And the reason Luke is thinking about time and free will is because he believes that money is the closest human beings have ever come to crystallizing time and free will into a compact physical form. Cash. Cash is a time crystal. Cash allows you to multiply your will, and it allows you to speed up time. Cash is what defines us as a species. Nothing else in the universe has money.

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland