In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.
— Douglas Coupland
I have trouble with seafood because it tastes like a dock.
Florida isn't so much a place where one goes to reinvent oneself, as it is a place where one goes if one no longer wished to be found.
Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.
Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?
Everybody has basically the same family, it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.
Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.
One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.
If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.
Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you.
Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.
Fate is for losers.
Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine.
If God drives a car, He'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, with oxblood leather upholstery and an opera window.
Make your goals big and broad enough so that they never become answered prayers and boomerang to curse you.
There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.
Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel. The smell. Try and you can't. The brain doesn't process negatives.
Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.
God is what keeps us together after the love is gone.
With Google I'm starting to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. People in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.
If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.
Salad bars are like a restaurant's lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.
We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but instead because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.
Everybody past a certain age, regardless of how they look on the outside, pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.
Christmas makes everything twice as sad.
Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.
If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil.
I want pills called September 10. You take one and your mind feels like the 11th never happened.
You can't fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.
Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive.
Blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos.
Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo.
Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.
Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.
It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.
Tofu hot dogs are actually scarier than real hot dogs. It's like wanting the worst possible meat product without even the thrill of it actually being meat.
The universe hands you opportunities for a while, and if you don't take them, the universe says to itself, 'Oh I see, this person doesn't like opportunities' and stops giving them to you.
What if God exists except it turns out he doesn't really like people very much?
Once you establish a look, and once everybody recognizes that look as your look, you never have to think about fashion again.
If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.
When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.
We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.
People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.
The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth, it's about the redistribution of time.
If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?
Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.
Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.
Only losers make decisions when things are bad. The time to rejig your life is the time when it's seemingly smooth.
Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.
I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and rename three o'clock 'Pepsi.'
