Top 100 Dave Eggers Quotes
#1. I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.
Dave Eggers
#2. 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.
Dave Eggers
#3. Dan nodded emphatically, as if his mouth had just uttered, independently, something that his ears found quite profound.
Dave Eggers
#4. There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in coastal Louisiana
Dave Eggers
#5. It was like setting up a guillotine in the public square.You don't expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it.
Dave Eggers
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Having a matrix of preferences presented as your essence, as the whole you? Maybe that was it. It was some kind of mirror, but it was incomplete, distorted.
Dave Eggers
#9. Public-private leads to private-private, and soon you have the Circle running most or even all government services,
Dave Eggers
#10. 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
#11. But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.
Dave Eggers
#12. When I was on the bestseller list with the first book, everyone who knows me knows that every week it continued to be on the list was a very dark week for me. Everyone knows that all I wanted was to be off that list.
Dave Eggers
#13. Things that exist exist, and everything is on their side.
Dave Eggers
#14. 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
#15. He remained, weeks after awakening, in that period of early-morning consciousness that allows easy re-entry to dreaming. His limbs still tingled with the residue of sleep, and most days he wanted badly to allow it to overtake him again.
Dave Eggers
#16. Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.
Dave Eggers
#17. It was as if, for a moment, she thought Mae was one kind of person, but now, knowing she was another, she could part with her, she could give her back to the world.
Dave Eggers
#18. Well, my background is journalism. I don't have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.
Dave Eggers
#19. We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.
Dave Eggers
#20. What had been intriguing on Monday and Tuesday was approaching annoying by Wednesday and exasperating by Thursday.
Dave Eggers
#21. She felt some measure of relief knowing that in the very least, on the open road she would have some time to think.
Dave Eggers
#22. 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
#23. When I'm doing work online or on the computer, it's one thing. When I want to read, I want to go elsewhere, and I want to be away from the screen.
Dave Eggers
#24. The inactive must justify their sloth by picking nits with those making an attempt -
Dave Eggers
#25. This war has made racists of too many of the and too many of us, and it is the leadership in Khartoum that has stoked this fire, that has brought to the surface, and in some cases created from whole cloth, new hatreds that have bred unprecedented acts of brutality.
Dave Eggers
#26. Too often they tell me to answer my doubts with prayer, which seems very much like addressing one's hunger by thinking of food.
Dave Eggers
#27. This was a new skill she'd acquired, the ability to look, to the outside world, utterly serene and even cheerful, while, in her skull, all was chaos.
Dave Eggers
#28. He was feeling buoyant, flexible. He wanted to go jogging. He stood. He couldn't go jogging. He called room service and ordered a basket of breads and pastries.
Dave Eggers
#29. She spent her idle time conceiving of musicals that would never be. It was the only medium that could properly express our true madness and hypocrisy---our collective ability to sit in a theater watching lunatics sing nonsense while the world outside burns.
Dave Eggers
#31. Like I don't know the first thing about how to be simply grateful that I'm alive. Maybe that's what's missing in our generation. Maybe we just feel too safe, too secure. We have too much stuff and no threat of any of it disappearing anytime soon.
Dave Eggers
#32. It was just an idea I had, that it could be cool to have a book covered in fake fur.
Dave Eggers
#33. - If it's like us, why is it somewhere else? Deng asked. Dut
Dave Eggers
#34. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.
Dave Eggers
#35. Knowledge is a basic human right. Equal access to all possible human experiences is a basic human right.
Dave Eggers
#36. I really believe strongly that kids should be spared the runoff of their parents' lives and problems.
Dave Eggers
#37. It is no way to live, to wait to love.
Dave Eggers
#38. If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
Dave Eggers
#39. One might think that a boy who was out in the snow for so long would get cold, but Max was not. He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys who are part wolf and part wind do not get cold.
Dave Eggers
#40. Animals howl, he had been told, to declare their existence.
Dave Eggers
#41. Well now you're contradicting yourself. With balance there cannot be chaos. With randomness there can be no punishment. You're pleading for punishment in hopes that you'll see your God. Without punishment there is no God. If there is balance then there is your Lord. If balance then afterlife.
Dave Eggers
#42. The peculiar problem of constant connectivity: any silence of more than a few hours provokes apocalyptic thoughts.
Dave Eggers
#43. Toph looks at me. I nod gravely. In this world, in our new world, there will be rocking. We will pay tribute to musicmakers like Journey, particularly if this is Two-for-Tuesday, which means inevitably that one of the songs will be: Just a small-town girl ...
Dave Eggers
#44. The death of a young person for no reason is an apocalypse.
Dave Eggers
#45. And now it is boring; here in Tanzania, she is bored. She will die of a crushing monotony before she even has a chance at a high-altitude cerebral edema. -
Dave Eggers
#46. The idea of 'Voice of Witness' is to let survivors and witnesses of human-rights abuses tell their story at length. It started with a course that I co-taught at U.C. Berkeley journalism school back in 2003.
Dave Eggers
#47. When there is pleasure, there is often abandon, and mistakes are made.
Dave Eggers
#48. Young men need to be kept away from guns, bombs, women, cars, hard alcohol and heavy machinery.
Dave Eggers
#49. But there is risk.
But the risk is worth it.
Dave Eggers
#50. The air is like being wanted, we say, and they nod approvingly. The air is like getting older, they say, and they touch our arms gently.
Dave Eggers
#51. Courage was the beginning, being unafraid, moving ahead, through small hardships, not turning back. Courage was simply a form of moving forward.
Dave Eggers
#52. Then he got more books. He saved all the books.
Dave Eggers
#53. I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing.
Dave Eggers
#56. In hospitals I feel palpable comfort. I feel the competence, the expertise, so much education and money, all of the supplies sterile, everything packaged, sealed tight. My fears evaporate when the automatic doors shush open.
Dave Eggers
#57. 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
#58. 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
#60. He must trust, and he must have faith. And so he builds, because what is building, and rebuilding and rebuilding again, but an act of faith?
Dave Eggers
#61. Eliminate lobbyists. Eliminate polls. It might even eliminate Congress. If we can know the will of the people at any time, without filter, without misinterpretation or bastardization, wouldn't it eliminate much of Washington?
Dave Eggers
#62. We've sent over 180 million frowns from the U.S alone, and you can bet that has an effect on the regime.
Dave Eggers
#63. 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
#64. I'm interested in the human impact of the giant foot of misplaced government. After all, we encounter it every day.
Dave Eggers
#65. Alan had never been stabbed or shot or punctured or broken. Were scars the best evidence of living? If we have not survived something, and thus were certain that we'd lived, we could scar ourselves, couldn't we?
Dave Eggers
#66. Likewise, everyone at the Circle there had been chosen, and thus the gene pool was extraordinary, the brainpower phenomenal. It was a place where everyone endeavored, constantly and passionately, to improve themselves, each other, share their knowledge, disseminate it to the world.
Dave Eggers
#67. She backed away, looking at him, his shirt hiked up, his crotch exposed. She could think only of a campfire, one small log, all of it doused in milk.
Dave Eggers
#68. You're breaking out of character, again.
Dave Eggers
#69. You wouldn't believe what people will believe once they know our story. They're ready for anything, basically - will believe anything, because they've been thrown off-balance, are still wondering if any of this is true, our story in general, but aren't sure and are terrified of offending us.
Dave Eggers
#70. But what I really want is to just swim around in a warm baby pool of these friends, jump in their dry leaf pile-to rub them all over myself, without words and clothes.
Dave Eggers
#71. I'll always be working on five things at once, usually with those documents open at the same time because if I get stuck somewhere I'll jump over to something else. That's how my head has always worked.
Dave Eggers
#72. But I'm thinking about 12 things at once, a hundred thousand times a day. Most people do, I would imagine.
Dave Eggers
#73. The only infallible truth of our lives is that everything we love in life will be taken from us.
Dave Eggers
#74. To be described is to be seduced. Shit. One turn of phrase. One thing noticed that she'd never noticed. It works always.
Dave Eggers
#75. 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.
Dave Eggers
#76. but look at it this way: If you've got the ugliest house on the street, you never have to look at it.
Dave Eggers
#77. You might not be able to operate your own Learjet and have an unlimited expense account, but if you have a reasonable expectation for a print-based product, whether it's a newspaper or a magazine, you can certainly exist.
Dave Eggers
#78. There has not been a beautiful death in the history of mankind.
Dave Eggers
#79. Alan was feeling strong. He did two push-ups and felt stronger still.
Dave Eggers
#80. It all meant something. Until it didn't.
Dave Eggers
#81. I think newspapers shouldn't try to compete directly with the Web, and should do what they can do better, which may be long-form journalism and using photos and art, and making connections with large-form graphics and really enhancing the tactile experience of paper.
Dave Eggers
#82. When I was very young I couldn't watch anything black and white on TV because I knew the people moving were now dust.
Dave Eggers
#83. If your hand doesn't work for it, your heart doesn't feel sorry for it.
Dave Eggers
#84. 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
#85. It's so easy to print in the Midwest. You're saving months in shipping and customs, so we have started printing a number of books there.
Dave Eggers
#86. To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise.
Dave Eggers
#87. I went to public school all my life and all through college and I liked it.
Dave Eggers
#88. I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I'd known. But I tried anyway.
Dave Eggers
#89. Don't presume the benevolence of your leaders.
Dave Eggers
#90. The money that could have saved the Shuttle, and the money we send to random countries, that we use to remake unchangeable countries ten thousand miles away.
Dave Eggers
#91. Maybe he was more than the sum of his broken parts.
Dave Eggers
#92. We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.
Dave Eggers
#93. Stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move.
Dave Eggers
#94. At that moment I was sure. That I belonged in my skin. That my organs were mine and my eyes were mine and my ears, which could only hear the silence of this night and my faint breathing, were mine, and I loved them and what they could do.
Dave Eggers
#95. 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.
Dave Eggers
#96. We've lost that very simple transaction that's so pure, where a reader can say, "I support what you're doing, here's my dollar. I know that you guys are gonna be watchdogs or keep the government accountable, so here's my 50-cent contribution each day." It's just so tidy, and I think so inspiring.
Dave Eggers
#97. The work of man is done behind the back of the natural world. When nature notices, and can muster the energy, it wipes the slate clean again.
Dave Eggers
#98. Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape.
Dave Eggers
#100. I didn't care anymore what my ancestors would think. We were the Red Army and needed to eat.
Dave Eggers
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