Douglas Coupland Time Quotations

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

I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it's a permanent state, and I'm still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.

I 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.

Headwise, I always kind of knew that everyone goes grey in our family very early - and I was like, it works for me. I started growing my beard, and it changes the shape of your skull and your face, and I started seeing my mother's side of the family in myself for the first time.

It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn't go about their daily routine with the assumption that at any moment another massive media technology will be dumped on us by some geek in California.

For 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.

Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space.

I 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.

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.

Money isn't money anymore. Time doesn't feel like time anymore. Your sense of community, it's evaporated, too, or it's turned into something you visit at 2 A.M. on a website.

Most time capsules, when they're unearthed, are really awful. There's nothing good in them.

Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad lasts for very very long.

TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.

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

Vaccinated Time Travel: To fantasize about traveling backward in time, but only with proper vaccinations.

HISTORICAL SLUMMING: the act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural villageslocations where time appears to have been frozen many years backso as to experience relief when one returns back to'the present'.

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

Sometimes I wonder if the world is too interesting and too boring at the same time.

The way we experience history and time in all its forms shifted quite massively between 1989 and 2001 - to the point where contrivances like decades are now kind of silly.

I like being surrounded by good ideas. Every single time you walk past something you like, you get a blast of happy chemicals to the brain, and I like that.

I've got all my old laptops going back to my first, which was so fancy at the time, in '93 or '94, but now it's just like a doorstop. One day I said, 'I'll go in and get all my old documents in there.' The cords and the wires are all gone, the discettes you need are gone. Meanwhile the little electrons are starting to wither away.

I'm not a hoarder, I'm a collector: if you have something you like, every time you see it, you have a little happy hit.

If money is not maintained, it can collapse like a bridge along Interstate 5 and fixing it, even with determined politicians, will take ages, during which time God only knows how much human damage will occur.

I've had maybe 20 jobs, big and small, and I've never hated any of them. At the same time, the moment the learning curve flattened, I was out of there.

If you waste five minutes of time a day, over the course of a year that adds up to one full work day. Think of five wasted minutes as a slow-release holiday drug. Savour it.

I can't switch time zones any more. London is one of my favourite places, but I'm always so zonked that I can't appreciate it. It's like a six-inch sheet of glass between me and Charing Cross Road.