Douglas Coupland Quotes

Bradyism: A multisibling sensibility derived from having grown up in large families…symptoms of Bradyism include a facility for mind games, emotional withdrawal in situations of overcrowding, and a deeply felt need for a well-defined personal space.

Strangelove Reproduction: Having children to make up for the fact that one no longer believes in the future.

I want to tell them that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for blithely handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear.

Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.

Shopping is Not Creating.

Marketing is essentially about feeding the poop back to diners fast enough to make them think they’re still getting real food.

Consensus Terrorism: The process that decides in-office attitudes and behavior.

Brazilification: The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.

Historical slumming: the act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural villages—locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back—so as to experience relief when one returns back to ‘the present’.

Historical overdosing: To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen.

Mcjob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice for people who have never held one.