Dave Eggers Quotes

That's the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. ~ Dave Eggers

ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN. ~ Dave Eggers

Be strong, be brave, be true. Endure. ~ Dave Eggers

The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard. It shifts and our cities fall; it sighs and the coasts are overtaken. ~ Dave Eggers

Alan was feeling strong. He did two push-ups and felt stronger still. ~ Dave Eggers

This is why Max loved Mr. Beckmann: he was an equal. He seemed to have navigated his way through seven or so decades of adulthood without forgetting one moment of his childhood- what he loved and hated, feared and coveted. ~ Dave Eggers

I don't mean to beat a made-in-America drum, but I would be lying if I said it doesn't feel somehow right to be printing books in the U.S. ~ Dave Eggers

We both see strangers and react. We don't like to walk by people without nodding. We're broken when people are rude. Were broken when people can't meet us halfway. We can't accept the limits of normal human relations-chilly, clothed, circumscribed. Our hearts pull against their leashes. ~ Dave Eggers

There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in coastal Louisiana ~ Dave Eggers

Yousef had been lighthearted during his questions, but there was something very serious and sad under his smile, and Alan knew what it was. It was the knowledge that there would be no fighting, and there would be no struggle, no stand taken, and that the two of them, because they were not lacking materially, because despite injustices in their countries they were the recipients of preposterous bounty, would likely do nothing. They were content, they had won. The fighting would be done by others, elsewhere. ~ Dave Eggers

I was trying to make the web more civil. I was trying to make it more elegant. I got rid of anonymity. I combined a thousand disparate elements into one unified system. But I didn't picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where all government and all life was channeled through one network. ~ Dave Eggers

Why shouldn't your curiosity about the world be rewarded? ~ Dave Eggers

Again the greatest use of a human was to be useful. Not to consume, not to watch, but to do something for someone else that improved their life, even for a few minutes. ~ Dave Eggers

I always like the idea of doing interviews with somebody but completely seriously not ever mentioning what that person is generally known for. ~ Dave Eggers

This was uncalled for. ~ Dave Eggers

Maybe he was more than the sum of his broken parts. ~ Dave Eggers

Thank you," he says.
"Thank who?"
"I don't know. You?"
"No, not me. Jesus."
"Thank you, Jesus?"
"Yes, Toph, Jesus died for your Christmas fun. ~ Dave Eggers

What would happen," Zeitoun asked the captain, "if you and I went below the deck, and just went to our bedrooms and went to sleep?"
The captain gave him a quizzical look and answered that the ship would most certainly hit something
would run aground or into a reef. In any event, disaster.
"So without a captain, the ship cannot navigate."
"Yes," the captain said, "What's your point?"
Zeitoun smiled. "Look above you, at the stars and moon. How do the stars keep their place in the sky, how does the moon rotate around the earth, the earth around the sun? Who's navigating?"
The captain smiled at Zeitoun. He'd been led into a trap.
"Without someone guiding us," Zeitoun finished, "wouldn't the stars and moon fall to earth, wouldn't the oceans overrun the land? Any vessel, any carrier of humans, needs a captain, yes?"
The captain was taken with the beauty of the metaphor, and let his silence imply surrender. ~ Dave Eggers

Did you hear that crazy man? we said.
Education is your mother? we said.
We laughed and did imitations. We thought Mr. Kondit, like more than a few of the men and boys who had crossed the desert to get to Ethiopia, had lost his mind along the way. ~ Dave Eggers

I had grown up as a fan of Studs Terkel. In Chicago he sort of looms large and is mentioned often. ~ Dave Eggers

Existing, period – that is what drives men to irrational acts. ~ Dave Eggers

Every time my brain parks the car neatly in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage. ~ Dave Eggers

You and I read the same books and hear the same sermons and we come away with different messages. That has to be evidence of some serious problem, right? ~ Dave Eggers

1. The Amazing Race
2. I Thought This Show Was Gonna Be About Aryans
3. Oh.
(Joe O'Neill, from Opium) ~ Dave Eggers

And that's actually the brunt of what we do is, people going straight from their workplace, straight from home, straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands more students. ~ Dave Eggers

Live long enough and you'll disappoint everyone. People think you're able to help them and usually you can't. And so it becomes a process of choosing the one or two people you try hardest not to disappoint. The person in my life I am determined not to disappoint is you. ~ Dave Eggers

I'm an amateur science enthusiast. I'm not even a professional enthusiast. I don't know anything; I never even passed biology in high school. But I read the science section of the newspaper. ~ Dave Eggers

All we really want is for no one to have a boring life, to be impressive, so we can be impressed. ~ on the friends we choose. ~ Dave Eggers

They clearly see through the whole thing, that we are using this to get exposure, to prove to all and ourselves that we are real, that we like everyone else simply want our lives on tape, proven, feel that what we are doing only becomes real once is has been entered into the record. ~ Dave Eggers

It occurred to her, in a moment of sudden clarity, that what had always caused her anxiety, or stress, or worry, was not any one force, nothing independent and external- it wasn't danger to herself or the constant calamity of other people and their problems. It was internal: it was subjective: it was not knowing. ~ Dave Eggers

I'm social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you're purveying. It improves nothing. It's not nourishing. It's like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You're not hungry, you don't need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you're pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. ~ Dave Eggers

It looked a lot like a dog.
"What's that?" Max asked, expecting to hear about a mythical creature with a mythical name.
Carol squinted and put his hand over his eyes to see better. "Oh that's a dog," he said. "I don't talk to that guy anymore. ~ Dave Eggers

My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance
this is why people tell me secrets
my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is ever lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound. ~ Dave Eggers

McSweeney's as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object. ~ Dave Eggers

You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You're at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you're staring at a screen, ~ Dave Eggers

I'm never a fan of the sociopathic kind of reviewing, people who are sort of self-immolating and have social problems or whatever, and let it out in literary-criticism form. I just feel like book reviewing should be respectful and calm and not filled with bile. ~ Dave Eggers

He had made a series of foolish decisions in his life. He had not planned well. He had not had courage when he needed it. His decisions had been short sighted. The decisions of his peers had been short sighted. These decisions had been foolish and expedient. ~ Dave Eggers

I wondered quickly if I'd give my life so that a dragon could live. If someone offered me that deal, your life for the existence of dragons.I thought maybe yes, maybe no. ~ Dave Eggers

I should probably get a stone. A stone would be good. A stone would save me, would salvage all the damage we had already done, all the things we had given up or lost. ~ Dave Eggers

Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn't our parents tell us about the weight?
- What weight?
- The fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If we're vessels, and we are, then we, you and I, are overfull, and that means she's at the bottom of a deep cold lake. How can she stand the hissing of all that water?
- We are not vessels; we are missiles.
- We're static and we're empty. We are overfull and leaden.
- We are airtight and we are missiles and all-powerful. ~ Dave Eggers

My head was a condemned church with a ceiling of bats, but I swung from this dark mood to euphoria when I thought about leaving. ~ Dave Eggers

( ... ) my problem with paper is that all communication dies with it. It holds no possibility of continuity. ~ Dave Eggers

Don't flatter yourself to think this is your doing. Your problem is that you think things have happened for the first time to you, and that you're the fulcrum from which all people and the current world pivot. ~ Dave Eggers

You know, it's been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher. ~ Dave Eggers

What had been intriguing on Monday and Tuesday was approaching annoying by Wednesday and exasperating by Thursday. ~ Dave Eggers

The waterfall, and the tiki torches, all of these things the stuff of vacations and dreams and impossible to maintain, but then she knew - and this is what was keeping her up, her head careening with something like a toddler's joy - that she would be going back to that place, the place where all these things happened. She was welcome there, employed there. ~ Dave Eggers

I know forever they will be in my house, the rooms of my mind, I know this and I have accepted this but while I know they will be there I want them dead there. I cannot have them breathing there! I want them in the floirboards of the basement of my soul. ~ Dave Eggers

It was not knowing that was the seed of madness, loneliness, suspicion, fear. ~ Dave Eggers

The feeling that your daughter is a deviant already and will only get worse. In a flash, you can see her as a feral adolescent, as a dirty-bomb teenager, a burst of invisible and spreading fury. Where is she now? She's fled, not to her room but somewhere else, a closet, she always hides somewhere disturbing, a place befitting a German fairy tale. Believe ~ Dave Eggers

You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it [dignity]. It's never dignified, always brutal. What's dignified about dying? It's never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it's fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it. ~ Dave Eggers

And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students. ~ Dave Eggers

First of all, I know it's all people like you. And that's what's so scary. Individually you don't know what you're doing collectively. ~ Dave Eggers

You're like part human, part rainbow. ~ Dave Eggers

Love is implicit in every connection. It should be. Thus when absent it makes us insane. (You Shall Know Our Velocity) ~ Dave Eggers

Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything. ~ Dave Eggers

It is very much, she thinks, like looking at the moon and knowing one could make it there, too. It is only time and breath that stand between her and the top. She is young. She'll do it and have done it. ~ Dave Eggers

But I'm thinking about 12 things at once, a hundred thousand times a day. Most people do, I would imagine. ~ Dave Eggers

Memory, perhaps, should have no physical shape. ~ Dave Eggers

But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren't going into the 'Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help' or something like that. It was 826 Valencia. ~ Dave Eggers

People don't like to be kept away from what they want. Especially when it appears within their reach. It makes one doubly angry. ~ Dave Eggers

I don't think I've ever gotten any significant thing I wanted. You have no idea how weird it is to envision things and have them come to nothing. No vision has ever come true, no promise has ever been kept. But then there was you, and you were the promise that would obliterate all the disappointments of the past. Everything about you insisted on it. Your color, your hair, the way light projects from every part of you. You were the sun that would burn away all the putrid broken promises of the world. ~ Dave Eggers

You don't propose marriage after one date. You don't decide on a career after one article or class session. You don't cast your vote based on one opinion of the candidate in question. Stories, essays, novels, and memoirs all deserve to be, indeed have to be read multiple times. Every writer worth his or her salt knows that writing is rewriting. Every reader should know the same thing about understanding text: that is, real reading is rereading. ~ Dave Eggers

Why would you need a ship, Max? You're thinking of leaving already?"
No, no," Max said. "This would be just for fun. Or emergencies." Carol's face had darkened and his eyes had gone small. His expression scattered Max's brain so much he started babbling: "It'll have a trampoline. And a big aquarium. An aquarium under the water, inside the ship, where we keep the fish and squids and stuff we like ... ~ Dave Eggers

Why do we pursue information that we know will never leave our heads? ~ Dave Eggers

Who says we don't want to be inspired? We fucking want to be inspired! What the fuck is wrong with us wanting to be inspired? Everyone acts like it's some crazy idea, some outrageous ungrantable request. Don't we deserve grand human projects that give us meaning? ~ Dave Eggers

It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar time, when we're losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn. But it doesn't have to be that way. ~ Dave Eggers

The country he had left thirty years ago had been a realistic place. There were political realities there, then and now, that precluded blind faith, that discouraged one from thinking that everything, always, would work out fairly and equitably. But he had come to believe such things in the United States. Things had worked out. Difficulties had been overcome. He had worked hard and achieved success. The machinery of government functioned. ~ Dave Eggers

I have had friends who I decided were not good friends, were people who brought more trouble than happiness, and thus I have found ways to create more distance between us. Now I have the same thoughts about God, my faith, that I had for these friends. God is in my life but I do not depend on him. My God is not a reliable God. ~ Dave Eggers

This part concerns the unshakable feeling one gets, one thinks, after the unthinkable and unexplainable happens
the feeling that, if this person can die, and that person can die, and this can happen and that can happen ... well, then what exactly is preventing everything from happening to this person, he around whom everything else happened?
Just as some police
particularly those they dramatize on television
might be familiar with death, and might expect it an any instant
so does the author, possessing a naturally paranoid disposition, compounded by environmental factors that make it seem not only possible but probable that whatever there might be out there that snuffs out life is probably sniffing around for him, that his number is perennially, eternally up, that his draft number is low, that his bingo card is hot, that he has a bull's-eye on his chest and target on his back. It's fun. You'll see. ~ Dave Eggers

We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our past and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. ~ Dave Eggers

My Cuddle Time Bible Story Book
Sleeping with Jesus
Baby Bibles: Tall Tales for Tiny tots
Everybody Poops (Except God) ~ Dave Eggers

I think there's great value to the Associated Press and to Reuters, but if you wanted to generate original content, maybe written by local writers, it just takes a little bit of openness to open your pages up to a wider freelance writer pool, and then you might find new voices and a wider array of voices, and definitely more original content that can't be found anywhere else. ~ Dave Eggers

It's the usual utopian vision. This time they were saying it'll reduce waste. If stores know what their customers want, then they don't overproduce, don't overship, don't have to throw stuff away when it's not bought. I mean, like everything else you guys are pushing, it sounds perfect, sounds progressive, but it carries with it more control, more central tracking of everything we do. ~ Dave Eggers

People are strange, but more than that, they're good. They're good first, then strange. ~ Dave Eggers

I smiled, though looking at William K caused me concern. He looked very ill, and he was my only mirror. We could not see ourselves so I relied on the appearance of the other boys, William K in particular, to know something of my own health. We ate the same food and were built in a similar way, so i watched him to see how thin i had become, how my eyes were growing more sunken. On this day i did not look good. ~ Dave Eggers

Now create in your mind the best of days, and memorize these details, place this day center in your mind, and when you are the most frightened, bring forth this day and place yourself within it. ~ Dave Eggers

Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape. ~ Dave Eggers

We've become a nation of indoor cats, he'd said. A nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers. Thank God these weren't the kind of Americans who settled this country. They were a different breed! They crossed the country in wagons with wooden wheels! People croaked along the way, and they barely stopped. Back then, you buried your dead and kept moving. ~ Dave Eggers

and because total non-communication in a place like the Circle was so difficult, it felt like violence. ~ Dave Eggers

The house is a factory. ~ Dave Eggers

What can one do with one's hands when the camera is interested in other things? ~ Dave Eggers

This could be the cause of all modern neurosis . . . [;] the fact that we have no immovable identity, no hard facts. That everything we know as foundational truth is subject to change. ~ Dave Eggers

I am too fucking fragile. I hate being fragile. ~ Dave Eggers

You treat a kid with respect and as an adult you talk to them as if they're smart people. But you don't throw at them the trappings of adulthood and you know, the darker stuff. ~ Dave Eggers

Hand and I needed pants, pants to end all pants - warm and cool, breathing and trapping in, full of pockets. ~ Dave Eggers

I would know that in any city, at an hour like this, there are people sleeping. That most people are sleeping. But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there are a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it's here that we need to be. That if we are living as we were this week, that we had to be awake with the people who were still dancing. ~ Dave Eggers

A promise is like the earth underneath us. It must be solid. How can we walk, and run, and live and laugh, when we can't count on the ground beneath us. And so it is with promises. They keep us upright. They hold up everyone and everything ~ Dave Eggers

The other cop is writing things down in his pad. The pad is so small. His pen is really small, too. They seem too small, the pen and pad. Personally, I would want a bigger pad. Then again, with a bigger pad, where would I put it? You'd need a pad-holster, which might look cool but would make it even harder to run, especially if you have the flashlight attachment . . . I guess you need a small pad so it'll fit on your utility belt - Oh, it would be so great if they called it a utility belt. Maybe I could ask. Not now, of course, but later. ~ Dave Eggers

What the fuck does it take to show you motherfuckers, what does it fucking take what do you want how much do you want because I am willing and I'll stand before you and I'll raise my arms and give you my chest and throat and wait, and I've been so old for so long, for you, for you, I want it fast and right through me
Oh do it, do it motherfuckers, do it do it you fuckers finally, finally, finally. ~ Dave Eggers

Carol turned around quickly as if stifling an urge to lunge at Max. He turned back to Max, straining to appear genial. "Okay," he said, "but will you come over here and put your head in my mouth again?"
Max continued to back up, "No, Carol. I don't want to right now. ~ Dave Eggers

Don't you think if someone like me, someone who invented most of this shit, is scared, don't you think you should be scared, too? ~ Dave Eggers

Recently, I've discovered Radiohead and find them to be quite good. So clearly, I'm some kind of musical retard. (Jonathan Ames, Middle-American Gothic) ~ Dave Eggers

Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know.
After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned ~ Dave Eggers

There were people in the world for whom the world and its people were subjects on which to cast spells. ~ Dave Eggers

Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day? ~ Dave Eggers

We knew nothing; the gaps in our knowledge were random and annoying. They were potholes - they could be patched but they multiplied without pattern or remorse. And even if we knew something, had read something, were almost sure of something, we wouldn't ever know the truth, or come anywhere close to it. The truth had to be seen. Anything else was a story, entertaining but more embroidered fib than crude, shapeless fact. ~ Dave Eggers

Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know- they'd trade it all to know they've been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment. ~ Dave Eggers

[M]y mother read a horror novel every night. She had read every one in the library. When birthdays and Christmas would come, I would consider buying her a new one, the latest Dean R. Koontz or Stephen King or whatever, but I couldn't. I didn't want to encourage her. I couldn't touch my father's cigarettes, couldn't look at the Pall Mall cartons in the pantry. I was the sort of child who couldn't even watch commercials for horror movies - the ad for Magic, the movie where marionette kills people. sent me into a six-month nightmare frenzy. So I couldn't look at her books, would turn them over so their covers wouldn't show, the raised lettering and splotches of blood - especially the V.C. Andrews oeuvre, those turgid pictures of those terrible kids, standing so still, all lit in blue. ~ Dave Eggers

Thoughts are made of water and water always finds a way. ~ Dave Eggers

Americans are born knowing everything and nothing. Born moving forward, quickly, or thinking they are. ~ Dave Eggers