Dave Eggers Quotations

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

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

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

The key thing is, even if you only have a couple of hours a month, those two hours shoulder-to-shoulder, next to one student, concentrated attention, shining this beam of light on their work, on their thoughts and their self-expression, is going to be absolutely transformative, because so many of the students have not had that ever before.

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

But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.

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.

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.

I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl's 'James and the Giant Peach'.

Three-dimensional results are important to me. I did once spend some time just writing, and floating around, and I lost my mind a little bit. I wasn't so good at that.

I think I'm far too hopeful and trusting. That's something I got from my mum.

You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time.

I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.

I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.

I went to public school all my life and all through college and I liked it.

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

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.

Status in itself is criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.

Our town was rigid in many ways, in terms of the uniformity of things, the colors of skin, the makes of cars, the lushness of the lawns, but on top of that it was sort of a blank canvas so-and again, I guess this is true of any child-I was ready to quickly accept the sudden and total substitutions of all I knew to be true.

I worked at Salon.com way back when they started, and there's just unmeasurable value to distributing words online, too, but I still get my news from the newspaper in the morning.

It all sounds good, and it seems to me, if a system would work, this might be the spot. But frankly, I don't think we have any good numbers to tell us if it's a viable option at this point.

All I ever wanted was to know what to do.

Who's got the Paris Review? ... It's under a new editor.

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.

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.

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.

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.

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

Morning comes like a scream through a pinhole.

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

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

How many times in life can we make decisions that are important but will not hurt anyone? Are we obligated- maybe we are- to say yes to any choice when no one will be hurt? We use the word hurt when talking about things like this because when these things go wrong it can feel as if you were hit in the sternum by a huge animal that's run for miles just to strike you.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite.

I was feeling everything too much. Everything pulled at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools.

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 went to Saudi Arabia in 2010, and spent most of my time in Jeddah and the King Abdullah Economic City.

I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.

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

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.

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.

Nonfiction narratives are really powerful and valid in themselves. But one thing that you don't get sometimes from the more clinical or academic books or nonfiction books is that you don't get to hear the person's voice; you don't get them as individuals. You get a few quotes and you hear them as sort of a case study: numbers, examples, anecdotes, maybe a paragraph here, and that's about it.

I always had a hard time with fiction. It does feel like driving a car in a clown suit. You're going somewhere, but you're in costume, and you're not really fooling anybody. You're the guy in costume, and everybody's supposed to forget that and go along with you. Obviously, it can work, it works all the time - well, it doesn't always work. Still, no matter what, I'm always looking at the form and addressing it, not ignoring it.

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

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

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

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.

Be strong, be brave, be true. Endure.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Every time a crime was committed by a Muslim, that person's faith was mentioned, regardless of its relevance. When a crime is committed by a Christian, do they mention his religion? ... When a crime is committed by a black man, it's mentioned in the first breath: 'An African American man was arrested today...' But what about German Americans? Anglo Americans? A white man robs a convenience store and do we hear he's of Scottish descent? In no other instance is the ancestry mentioned.

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.

I often cannot believe the things I do.

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.

WHEN we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don't blame the soldiers.

The voice of the nickly reflection of the moon was not as deep as you might expect. It was a singer’s voice, though, a tenor, one that loved itself without reservation. “I feel time like you dream. Your dreams are jumbled. You can’t remember the order of your dreams, and when you recall them, the memories bend. Faces change. It’s all in puddles and ripples. That’s what time is for me.

The pain is not great. But the symbolism is disagreeable.

Then he got more books. He saved all the books.

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?

She felt some measure of relief knowing that in the very least, on the open road she would have some time to think.

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.

When we pass by another person without telling them we love them it’s cruel and wrong and we all know this.

I am a freak in secondhand velour, a leper who uses L'Oreal Anti-sticky Mega Gel. I am rootless, ripped from all foundations, an orphan raising an orphan and wanting to take away everything there is and replace it with stuff I've made.

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.

Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

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

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)

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.

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.

People say I talk slowly. I talk in a way sometimes called laconic. The phone rings, I answer, and people ask if they've woken me up. I lose my way in the middle of sentences, leaving people hanging for minutes. I have no control over it. I'll be talking, and will be interested in what I'm saying, but then someone-I'm convinced this what happens-someone-and I wish I knew who, because I would have words for this person-for a short time, borrows my head. Like a battery is borrowed from a calculator to power a remote control, someone, always, is borrowing my head.

Maybe he hadn't thought the war through. It had seemed like simple fun when he had first pictured it, with a glorious beginning, a difficult but valor-filled middle, and a victorious end. He hadn't accounted for the fact that there might not be much of a resolution to the battle, and he hadn't imagined what it would feel like when the war just sort of ended, without anyone admitting defeat and congratulating him for his bravery.

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

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

We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.

For years I feared the opening of every elevator, half-convinced that from the opened doors would come a bullet, for me, shot by a man in a tan trenchcoat. I have no idea why I feared this, expected it to happen. I even knew how I would react to this bullet coming from the elevator door, what word I would say. That word was: Finally.

A combination of acting, lying, begging, and cheating.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.