Best JPod Quotes by Douglas Coupland

"Sex is everywhere in even the drabbest office environment. But then, so is death. Find the middle ground."

"Nobody will ever check your credentials unless you run for public office or become head of a school; the secret message is 'don't aim for the top—aim for someplace two notches below the top.'"

"Even when life is good, it isn't really good."

"The older the culture is, the less cutesy it is about saying, 'Well, you're a winner because you tried your best.'"

"Most people's dreams are boring. What if you had a dream to sell roadside corn—if you went and sold it, would that mean you were living your dream?"

"You can't fake creativity, competence or sexual arousal."

"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."

"Using the keypad, spell the last name of the person you wish to speak with."

"If someone's bothering you at work, ask him or her to make a donation to a charity. Keep a can and donation slip handy for this purpose."

"Can you imagine the annual family Christmas card photocopied mail-out? Dan broke his arm skiing in February, but six weeks in a splint and he's tickety-boo. Laurie got her accreditation and is now a fully qualified dental hygienist. Mark brought shame upon the family after he signed up for the local community college's Clown Program. He says the program will put him into the clown fast track, but he's now dead to us."

"I bet Ronald is home as we speak—it's his day off. He's in his bathrobe and staring out the den window at his immaculately maintained front garden. He wonders if it was all worth it—the fame, the money, the fries—and then he has this moment when he realizes that this is all he'll ever be. It shocks him—the purity of the emotion. He has to sit down in an armchair."

"And just then, the Hamburglar walks in wearing a pink nightie."

"I'm single at the moment, but have had two reasonably longish relationships. Both ended because they simply weren't The One, which is such a corny notion."

"Naughty Ronald, you mayonnaise-guzzling bun pig..."

"It must be hard to live at the top, what with Wendy and Burger King always waiting to knife you in the back."

"It's not like I'm married to my job, but a little 'Honey, how was your day?' goes a long way."

"As I'm supposed to be winning your matehood here, I ought to be more cheerful."

"Just because I didn't root for the white one?"

"Let's take a minute-long break and blithely pimp for the tobacco industry."

"She went downstairs and took the biggest bud off The Dude. Smoked the whole frigging thing."

"To be merely good enough is to never succeed."

"I see what it is—genetics are logarithmic, whereas potency counts aren't."

"You feel chilled because you have no character. You're a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism."

"I'm really sick of everybody trying to be different from everybody else."

"Everyone in jPod was beavering away, and my entrance generated no enthusiasm."

"Every five years you have to throw away everything you know and learn a whole new set of hardware and software specs."

"You're glamorized drosophila flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim."

"If you don't have a character to begin with, everything and nothing is in character."

"Words failed me and then re-entered my life."

"She pulled a gun from her purse, and one shot later, Gumdrop met his maker."

"Gee, player. That was a super-duper wheelie."

"I never meet people who say no to me. I'm a bit curious to see what sort of person Greg's brother might be."

"The computer's buying time while it generates the new worlds behind them."

"In about fifty years, real-life genetic traits will be as modular as those you're witnessing on my screen."

"The way you deal with money is learned behaviour you get from your father. If he was superstitious about money, you will be, too."

"Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise."

"Fear is nature's way of making sure too many people don't get everything they want."

"People who go to seminars and come away from them thinking they no longer have fears are a real nuisance."

"It's always easiest just to blame your parents."

"Some people are only interested in people who are in pain."

"Pretending you're passionate about something you're not really passionate about is just plain depressing."

"People will always choose more money over more sex."

"Here at American Airlines we believe in alchemy."

"If you think being frugal makes you look sensible, just stop right now."

"Ask these people, 'Hey, does this mean everything you say that doesn't have 'frankly' in front of it is bullshit?'"

"The three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity."

"In a way, the best meetings are the ones where nobody is creative and nobody has any ideas about anything."

"I call it the trans-fatty acid vapour funnel."

"In order for something to become boring, it has to be interesting to begin with."

"The voice you use when you're not telling the truth."

"Imagine a world in which there was only Coke, and no Pepsi."

"We just invented a cubicle game called Baffle. It's a hot potato clone."

"FUN FACT: any even number can be made by adding together two primes."

"Feng shui's one of those mumbo-jumbo Chinese things people expect Chinese people to get all serious about. It's total crap, but I use it all the time to haggle for lower prices."

"Anime performed a vital Darwinian function. In the early 1990s, the animation world was becoming shockingly lazy."

"A girl can't control who will and who won't fall in love with her, Ethan."

"It's like trying to reconcile wave-particle duality. You can't taste the caffeinated brew at the same time you taste the decaf—or vice versa."

"Maybe, but what if it turns out that the numbers form a kind of Magic Eye image, and when your brain resolves it, you see a goat walking on its hind legs, drinking from a horn full of blood?"

"It's a proven fact that women with British accents climb corporate ladders much more quickly in North America than those of us who speak with a shopping mall accent."

"You get lost doing just one task, and suddenly you look up and it's dark out, but you still don't want to leave your headspace."

"Has anybody in the history of humanity ever sat down one day and said to themselves, You know, I'd like nothing more right now than to eat a crisp yummy radish?"

"Time to go back to Kam and his exclusive alpine hideaway."

"I've noticed that, as we ramp up on our game-building skills and generalized knowledge about Ronald, we're googling every ten minutes. The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we've started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything."

"Unless your life was a story it had no meaning, that you might as well be kelp or bacteria."

"You're not walking diseases in need of correction. You're confident industry professionals who lead rich, rewarding lives and who don't need to prove anything to anybody."

"All I want to do is ask freedom about a new boron phosphate fertilizer she's imported from Vietnam. It's raising her crop yield remarkably."

"What an amazing woman. So strong. So confident. So manly yet female at the same time. So forceful."

"There was a part of me that knew things were all wrong in my life. But in order to repress that emotion, I'd do things like wear sweaters draped over my shoulders with the arms twisted together. I didn't want to be who I was."

"The entire Dale Carnegie method of Winning Friends and Influencing People boils down to ways of mechanically training yourself past facial blindness."

"What we describe as 'character' and 'personality' are not so much spiritual or cosmic states of being, but rather, an overall effect created by clusters of overlapping brain dysfunctions."

"Cowboy, I may not be a member of Van Halen, but I do know one must serve drinks at a party."

"Witness the universally understood archetype of the class clown. Is he funny and lovable, or is he farther along the personality spectrum of disinhibition?"

"Steve, why don't you just kick your habit? I feel like I'm back doing Gord-O's Cheerios runs."

"I'm one of the world's few experts on mini-bars."

"Stuff that could get them arrested or cause them shame."

"Sounds like Diane needed a reality sandwich."

"The Dianes of this world usually get hosed, don't they?"

"Marketers like to believe that their skills are fully translatable into any other product group."

"Shitty idea, huh? I'm not creative, and yet I felt a need to maintain the illusion of being creative."

"I wasn't even aware I was alive. It wasn't heaven and it wasn't hell. It was interesting."

"You're never too old to dance, Dad...and you're never too old to dream."

"Christ, she looks like Fred Flintstone's fetus."

"The rhythm of John Doe's typing was growing more manic over on his side of the baffles."

"I did my grade-seven science fair project on pi. I knew them all up to about the two thousandth digit, and then I thought it'd be sexier to play it dumb. It's one of my life's biggest regrets that I never got to remember up to the ten thousandth digit. It was like I made pi my special friend and only he and I could hang out together. How could I ever forget that first love affair?"

"Yes, pi is special—but so are randomly generated numbers. Inside this list of 58,894 random numbers I've substituted a capitalized letter O for a zero. Without using your FIND command, the first person to locate the 'O' will win the chance for me to karaoke to any song of their choice. Ready? One, two, three, go."

"Dad, she hasn't even known the woman for fifteen minutes. She probably went out to buy groceries and you're misinterpreting it."

"I may be pissed to the gills, but there's no way I'm going to pay full retail when I can get bulk powder at Costco."

"Jesus, Dad—are you cheap in your dreams at night, too?"

"Toilet tissue manufacturers divide end users into two categories: people who crumple their paper and people who fold it."

"When I crumple my paper, in my head it feels like a particle-based onscreen effect, like an explosion. That's not just a wad of paper in my left hand—it's a non-dimensional pyrotechnical event."

"Gore is Nature's way of saying, 'There are too many human beings on the planet, and I'm trying to rectify this any way I can.'"

"I think computers ought to have a key called l5M DRUNK, and when you push it, it prevents you from sending email for twelve hours."

"Doors are nothing more than flat wooden burkas invented to keep women from feeling proud and fallopian."

"I know what you're thinking, but I am not a lesbian. I just need to reclaim my ovarian inner landlord."

"If caring about your friends is a crime, then come and arrest me right now."

"If you don't think you're capable of love, you must be doing something with all that love energy inside you."

"That's so adorable! You should let word get out—girls would swarm you."

"I think I hear the sound of someone who didn't make the high school math stream."

"Don't worry your pretty little brain, pudding, no one's going to say anything ever again to make you feel small."

"Life is dull, but it could be worse and it could be better."