Dave Eggers Quotes

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I'd like to see them again. And I'd love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there.

Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.

We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.

Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?

Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane.

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.

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It's just not my thing anymore.

Still though, I think if you're not self-obsessed, you're probably boring.

3. There are bears and there are small dogs. Be strong like bear! If they take out your teeth, sit on the dogs. Bears always forget they can just sit on the dogs. Sit on the dogs.

Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time.

Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot.

We see the beauty within and cannot say no.

Why did we do that to Pluto? We had it good with Pluto.

You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back.

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

Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.

I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I'd lose my mind.

We were fools and now we were driving to our deaths in a rental car. Janet Jackson was tinkling from the speakers, asking what we had done for her as of late

Morning comes like a scream through a pinhole.

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.

There is travel and there are babies; everything else is drudgery and death.

I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing.

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

We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.

The raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can't cut corners.

I'm interested in the human impact of the giant foot of misplaced government. After all, we encounter it every day.

It's not that our family has no taste, it's just that our family's taste is inconsistent.

If you don't want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You're taking up space, air.

It was just an idea I had, that it could be cool to have a book covered in fake fur.

I hung up the phone, jubilant, and threw myself into a wall, then pretended to be getting electrocuted. I do this when I'm very happy.

I grew up north of Chicago, not far from where the Schwinn bicycle plant used to be, and was conscious of the fact that these beautiful, everlasting bikes were made just down the road.

Because I grew up with this naive expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation.

Why do you want to be on The Real World? Because I want everyone to witness my youth. Why? Isn't it gorgeous?

And there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.

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

I've never had WiFi at home. I'm too easily distracted, and YouTube is too tempting.

I had the sensation that I might always be running like this, that I would always have to run, and that I would always be able to run.

The house is a factory.

I am a bike enthusiast; there's a certain amount of romance to bikes. They're both beautiful and utilitarian.

Be strong, be brave, be true. Endure.

Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the tree calligraphic.

It is no way to live, to wait to love.

The only infallible truth of our lives is that everything we love in life will be taken from us.

If your hand doesn't work for it, your heart doesn't feel sorry for it.

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.

But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it’s here that we need to be.

The only thing that everyone needs to look out for is keeping the students reading through high school and thereafter.