Douglas Coupland Quotes

You know, you get to a certain age, 45, 50, I don't know when it happens, I said, 'Jesus, all I got is a certain amount of time. Maybe I should think about using it a little better.'

When you are five, you know your age down to the month. Even in your twenties, you know how old you are. I'm twenty-three you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties, something strange starts to happen. It is a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I'm--you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you are not. You're thirty-five. And then you're bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it's decades before you admit it.

There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.

The midlife crisis you're having at 30 is indulgent, but the midlife crisis you have at 45 is to an extent thrust upon you.

We are wrong in looking forward to death: in great measure it's past already.

The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence.

The only real change in life comes with the consciousness of old age.

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.

You can almost measure where you are in life by the degree to which you have begun looking back rather than ahead.

If you do not know your place in the world and the meaning of your life, you should know there is something to blame; and it is not the social system, or your intellect, but the way in which you have directed your intellect.

The thing about 50 is that you've clearly reached a point where you have more of your life behind you than ahead of you, and that's a very different place to be in. You're thinking, 'I've done most of it.' I don't like that feeling. But it makes you evaluate your life and go, 'Am I doing what I want to do? Am I spending my time the way I want?'

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

When you're 20, you think the whole world is talented, but whenyou get older, you realize the opposite is true.

When I write I get to the point where I slow down and I gotta go back into the world and live nahmean.

But death we are, and death we've always been.

I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: "Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I'll be ready.

The whole life of a philosopher is the meditation of his death.

And then he drew a dial from his poke, And looking with lack-lustre eye, Says very wisely, 'It is ten o'clock: Thus we may see', Quoth he, 'how the world wags: 'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, And after one hour more 'twill be eleven; And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, And then from hour to hour we rot and rot.

We're all going to die; I'm just trying to make it a little more interesting.

What's the point of trying to fix a world we're so briefly in?

A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience.

You do become more aware of your mortality as you get older. When you're little, you jump on any wild horse. Then you get a little bit older and realize how fragile life is, and you're more careful.

age is nothing but death that is conscious.

Don't try to blame the rest of the world. The blame only lies with you. Recognize that immediately.