The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.
Douglas Coupland
People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.
Blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos.
Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.
If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.
One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.
Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long.
Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.
Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.
I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.
Every single moment is a coincidence.
Adventure without risk is Disneyland.
Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine.
Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.
If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?
Your body isn't just a body. It's an ecosystem.
Flying dreams mean that you're doing the right thing with your life.
If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.
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.
Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.
Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
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.
A ring is a halo on your finger.
Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one's taking.
You can't get mad at weather because weather's not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life.
When Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, was he trading up or trading down?
There are three things we cry about in life, things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.
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.
Ten commandments yet seven deadly sins: conflict?
Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo.
Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.
I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C's and D's. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room.
Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.
Purchased experiences don't count.
Everyone should have a tailor. David Wilkes, the guy who does my stuff, is like, 'Well you're a writer - do you want a special pen compartment or something?' Bespoke: That's the term you want to get out there.
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.
In the future, IKEA will become an ever more spiritual sanctuary. In the future, your dream life will increasingly look like Google street view. Everyone will be feeling the same way as you, and there's some comfort to be found there.
Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.
Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.
Christmas makes everything twice as sad.
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.
It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.
Vancouver is the square root of negative one. Technically it shouldn't exist, but it does. I can't imagine living anywhere else.
Clowns drink to blot out the ravages of terrifying children for a living.
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.'
Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you.
In a faraway land called 'pre-2000,' what Earthlings now call blogging was called 'keeping a diary.' It's hard work to do well. I tried doing it in the early 1990s but had to stop because I no longer had a life - instead I had this thing that generated anecdotes to go into my diary. The diary took over and I had to stop.
There used to be a tradition of the loveable rogue who would steal from the honour boxes in churches and buy a round of drinks with the money he snagged. And everyone would find him tremendously good company. But not any more.
Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.
We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.
