Top 100 Eggers's Quotes
#1. I first became familiar with Dave Eggers's work when I was living in San Francisco and enrolled at USF's MFA Program.
James Bernard Frost
#2. Now Dave Eggers, if you lived in San Francisco, is not an easy person to be done with. Everyone - and by everyone, I mean every white person with a college education and an interest in books - wants a piece of him. It's not just his amazingly powerful prose; it's also his charitable works.
James Bernard Frost
#3. There are times when I am concerned about Toph's expression when I'm really singing, with vibrato and all, singing the guitar parts and everything - an expression that to the untrained eye might look like abject terror, or revulsion - but I know well enough that it is awe.
Dave Eggers
#4. 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
#5. To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way.
Dave Eggers
#6. You see pictures of Buddha and he's sitting, reclining, at peace. The Hindus have their twelve-armed elephant god, who also seems so content but not powerless. But leave it to Christians to have a dead and bloody man nailed to a cross.
Dave Eggers
#7. Maybe if he was the sort of man who could eat someone else's hash browns, who the hotel wanted to impress so much they sent him someone else's breakfast, maybe then he was the sort of man who could get an audience with the King.
Dave Eggers
#8. I think there's a future where the Web and print coexist and they each do things uniquely and complement each other, and we have what could be the ultimate and best-yet array of journalistic venues.
Dave Eggers
#9. The key thing is managed awareness of your role in the world and history. Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That's the best you can do.
Dave Eggers
#10. You sit at a desk twelve hours a day and you have nothing to show for it except for some numbers that won't exist or be remembered in a week. You're leaving no evidence that you lived. There's no proof.
Dave Eggers
#11. Your life has been lived a hundred times. A thousand times. It's not all that great, really. Don't take it so seriously. Don't handle it so delicately.
Dave Eggers
#12. We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.
Dave Eggers
#13. It's not that our family has no taste, it's just that our family's taste is inconsistent.
Dave Eggers
#14. But something about his inability to give in, to admit defeat, or to at least acknowledge the incredible power of the technology at Mae's command ... she knew she couldn't give up until she had received some sense of his acquiescence.
Dave Eggers
#15. Kit, you say your mother hasn't changed, but she has. A hundred times she's changed. It's important to know with adults, thought there is continual development, there is not always improvement. There is change, but not necessarily growth.
Dave Eggers
#16. 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.
Dave Eggers
#17. So many people who wanted no part of all this. That's what's new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that's over. Completion is the end. We're closing the circle around everyone - it's a totalitarian nightmare.
Dave Eggers
#18. - If it's like us, why is it somewhere else? Deng asked. Dut
Dave Eggers
#19. I still get my news from the newspaper in the morning. I just have an affection for paper, and that's no secret, I guess.
Dave Eggers
#20. 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
#21. When we pass by another person without telling them we love them it's cruel and wrong and we all know this.
Dave Eggers
#22. 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
#23. 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.
Dave Eggers
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. But of course there's no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It's the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons
Dave Eggers
#27. But Tom," said the moon, "the swinging of your pendulums! Everyone's a pendulum swinging, to and fro, and always you're getting hit by someone else's swinging pendulum. You're minding your own business, but someone else'e pendulum is swinging around, and pow! you get it in the head.
Dave Eggers
#28. But you know, there's something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention - they go home, they're finished. They don't stall, they don't do their homework in front of the TV.
Dave Eggers
#29. He's turned inside out, and is with the Sudanese to find out how to become right again.
Dave Eggers
#30. So this is the space during tutoring hours. It's very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, complete devotion to the students' work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas.
Dave Eggers
#31. 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
#32. You look at pictures of Nepal, push a smile button, and you think that's the same as going there.
Dave Eggers
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excuse the use of that second word, because I realize it's presumptuous. Also, excuse the first word, and the term in general.
Dave Eggers
#36. I think I'm far too hopeful and trusting. That's something I got from my mum.
Dave Eggers
#37. 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
#38. Josie glanced back to the TV. Again the players seemed to be celebrating some minor achievement. It offended the eye at first, then Josie grew to understand it. That's what's missing in my life, she thought. The celebration of every single moment, like those fucking idiots on TV.
Dave Eggers
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. The weird thing is that working within an established story was actually kind of liberating. You know the beginning and middle and end, more or less, so there's less pressure to figure all that out.
Dave Eggers
#42. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. And besides that, it's fucking dorky. Mae exhaled
Dave Eggers
#43. I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl's 'James and the Giant Peach'.
Dave Eggers
#44. The truth is that I do not like hanging in there. I was born, I believe, to do more. Or perhaps it's that I survived to do more. Dorsetta is married, a mother of three, and manages a restaurant; she does more than hang in there. I have a low opinion of this expression, Hang in there.
Dave Eggers
#45. 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
#46. There's less need to slowly acclimate these guys to the tank," Bailey said. "They'll be food pretty soon, so their happiness is less important than the shark's.
Dave Eggers
#47. But while mum and dad were incredibly caring, it was also a very chaotic household where everyone fought about everything. So I know what it's like to internalize all that chaos.
Dave Eggers
#48. What can one do with one's hands when the camera is interested in other things?
Dave Eggers
#49. A secret between two friends, Mae, is an ocean. It's wide and deep and we lose ourselves in it.
Dave Eggers
#50. 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
#51. I regretted making a comment about Dave Eggers. I've never said anything about McSweeneys except that I admire what it is, and I think it's great that they keep people interested in literature.
James Frey
#52. There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in coastal Louisiana
Dave Eggers
#53. Nicaragua sounded dangerous; she liked the word. Nicaragua! It sounded like some kind of spider. There it goes, under the table - Nicaragua!
Dave Eggers
#54. Americans are born knowing everything and nothing. Born moving forward, quickly, or thinking they are.
Dave Eggers
#55. It only takes one person, one small act of stepping from the dark to the light.
Dave Eggers
#56. No. There is no balance, and no retribution, and no rules. The rules and balances you blather about are hopeful creations of a man fearing death.
Dave Eggers
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. and because total non-communication in a place like the Circle was so difficult, it felt like violence.
Dave Eggers
#62. Dave Eggers is a prince among men when it comes to writing deeply felt, socially conscious books that meld reportage with fiction. While A Hologram for the King is fiction ... it's a strike against the current state of global economic injustice.
Elissa Schappell
#63. When you're in your twenties in a new city where no one's from here, we're all sort of orphans. The only people that you can count on our bunch of people that you work with and that you know. You're only as good as the reliability of that latticework.
Dave Eggers
#64. As we all know here at the Circle, transparency leads to peace of mind. No longer
Dave Eggers
#65. 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
#66. Dan nodded emphatically, as if his mouth had just uttered, independently, something that his ears found quite profound.
Dave Eggers
#68. 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
#69. Every time someone started shouting about the supposed monopoly of the Circle, or the Circle's unfair monetization of the personal data of its users, or some other paranoid and demonstrably false claim, soon enough it was revealed that that person was a criminal or deviant of the highest order.
Dave Eggers
#70. People move up here pretty reliably, and as you know we hire almost exclusively from within. So
Dave Eggers
#71. Did children want sports cars for parents? No. They wanted Hondas. They wanted to know that the car would start in all seasons.
Dave Eggers
#72. This had happened to him before - in an effort to disappear, he had made himself more conspicuous.
Dave Eggers
#73. The men who are dropped in a jungle or a desert and expected video games and got mundanity and depravity and friends dying like animals.
Dave Eggers
#74. I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.
Dave Eggers
#75. When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes.
Dave Eggers
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. You can't ever guess at life, at pain. All pain is real, and all pain is personal. It's the most personal thing we have. It eats each of us differently.
Dave Eggers
#79. You don't know what it's like to be a man over thirty who's never had anything happen to him. You spend so many years trying to stay safe, stay alive, to avoid some unknown horror. Then you realize the horror is existence itself. The nothing-happening.
Dave Eggers
#80. 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.
Dave Eggers
#81. 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
#82. But that's one lifetime." Yeah." But while doing that one I'd want to be able to have done other stuff. Whole other lives- the one where I sail-" I know, on a boat you made yourself.
Dave Eggers
#83. Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, 'The Things They Carried', has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.
Dave Eggers
#84. You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you've done nothing good for yourself. That's the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.
Dave Eggers
#85. I've always been interested in the form itself, so I always feel like I've never been good at going ahead with the artifice and not acknowledging the self in the artistic process, and not acknowledging the absurdity of pretending that's required in fiction.
Dave Eggers
#86. Every time my brain parks the car neatly in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage.
Dave Eggers
#87. Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let's not forget this.
Dave Eggers
#88. I've purposely stayed away from reading much about postmodern theory, and most everything I have read just bored me to tears. I don't think anybody's written about it, or very few have, with any verve.
Dave Eggers
#89. They took my mother's stomach out six months ago.
Dave Eggers
#90. I am a bike enthusiast; there's a certain amount of romance to bikes. They're both beautiful and utilitarian.
Dave Eggers
#91. 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
#92. Why did we do that to Pluto? We had it good with Pluto.
Dave Eggers
#93. They downloaded another customer query, and Mae scrolled through the boilerplates, found the appropriate answer, personalized it, and sent it back.
Dave Eggers
#94. 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
#95. Every act of charity has choice at its core.
Dave Eggers
#96. But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.
Dave Eggers
#97. Something about how all this could or would lead to totalitarianism. Her stomach sank.
Dave Eggers
#99. 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
#100. Public-private leads to private-private, and soon you have the Circle running most or even all government services,
Dave Eggers
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