Dave Eggers Quotes

I was born into a town and a family and the town ad my family happened to me. I own none of it. It i...

There’s less need to slowly acclimate these guys to the tank,” Bailey said. “They’ll be food pretty ...

You look at pictures of Nepal, push a smile button, and you think that’s the same as going there.

Dear Producers, Something is radiating deep within me and it must be transmitted or I will implode a...

You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it [dignity]. It's never dignified,...

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

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

His frustration with some Americans was like that of a disappointed parent. He was so content in thi...

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

The country he had left thirty years ago had been a realistic place. There were political realities ...

The men who are dropped in a jungle or a desert and expected video games and got mundanity and depra...

You and I read the same books and hear the same sermons and we come away with different messages. Th...

You see pictures of Buddha and he’s sitting, reclining, at peace. The Hindus have their twelve-armed...

You don’t know what it’s like to be a man over thirty who’s never had anything happen to him. You sp...

Who says we don’t want to be inspired? We fucking want to be inspired! What the fuck is wrong with u...

The death of a young person for no reason is an apocalypse.

–Don’t you think the vast majority of the chaos in the world is caused by a relatively small group o...

If you don’t have something grand for men like us to be part of, we will take apart all the little t...

Your memory has always been given to opportunistic revision.

We have no choice. We need the communion of souls and only here are they awake.

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

My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's op...

Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane.

Who were these people, all of them young couples, a few fabulous ones, tall thin-haired blondes with...

No. There is no balance, and no retribution, and no rules. The rules and balances you blather about ...

I hung up the phone, jubilant, and threw myself into a wall, then pretended to be getting electrocut...

How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated t...

The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excus...

Always we learn things and then we forget them.

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

Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn't our parents tell us about the weight?—What weight?...

I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed imposs...

He handed Mae a piece of paper, on which he'd written, in crude all capitals, a list of assertions u...

Here though, there are no oppressors. No one's forcing you to do this. You willingly tie yourself to...

It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever le...

This was a new skill she'd acquired, the ability to look, to the outside world, utterly serene and e...

I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to l...

This morning there s first a predictable story about Darfur; an expert on African affairs notes that...

I want to be seen. I want proof I existed.

So this is the space during tutoring hours. It's very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, c...

It was a broken world, I knew then, that would allow a boy such as me to bury a boy such as William ...

McSweeney's as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physic...

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

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

I wondered quickly if I'd give my life so that a dragon could live. If someone offered me that deal,...

Yousef had been lighthearted during his questions, but there was something very serious and sad unde...

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

This war has made racists of too many of the and too many of us, and it is the leadership in Khartou...

Surveillance shouldn't be the tradeoff for any goddamn service we get.

Suffering is only suffering if it's done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in vie...

That’s what’s new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that’s over. Completion is the...

If things continue this way, there will be two societies - or at least I hope there will be two - th...

The world, every day, is New. Only for those born in, say, 1870 or so, can there be a meaningful use...

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

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

I should probably get a stone. A stone would be good. A stone would save me, would salvage all the d...

It is very much, she thinks, like looking at the moon and knowing one could make it there, too. It i...

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

People say I talk slowly. I talk in a way sometimes called laconic. The phone rings, I answer, and p...

It was like setting up a guillotine in the public square.You don't expect a thousand people to line ...

Oh I could be out, rollicking in the ripeness of my flesh and others’, could be drinking things and ...

When my parents passed on, and we read their wills, we discovered something we didn’t at all expect,...

All we really want is for no one to have a boring life, to be impressive, so we can be impressed. ~ ...

I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him no...

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

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

I will tell these stories...because to do anything else would be something less than human. I speak ...

His lies were so exquisite I almost wept.

I was trying to make the web more civil. I was trying to make it more elegant. I got rid of anonymit...

For a moment, she thought it natural in a way seeing a plane fall from the sky can seem natural, too...

He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys whoa re part wolf and par...

Maybe he hadn't thought the war through. It had seemed like simple fun when he had first pictured it...

Ty swept his arms around, encompassing everything around them, the vast campus above. “All this. The...

Grief doesn't arrive on schedule, as much as we'd like to.

We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time...

I mean, all this stuff you're involved in, it's all gossip. It's people talking about each other beh...

Director of Ensuring the Future

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

Max had to think about these new developments. He hadn't liked getting hit by a rock--his stomach st...

How lame this is, how small, terrible. Or maybe it is beautiful. I can't decide if what I am doing i...

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

Not that there seems to be any appropriate place to bury someone, but these municipal cemeteries, or...

You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man wal...

[M]y mother read a horror novel every night. She had read every one in the library. When birthdays a...

Thank you," he says."Thank who?""I don't know.

Did children want sports cars for parents? No. They wanted Hondas. They wanted to know that the car ...

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

The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard.

People worried about our passing over into some robotic state, but we were so much like robots alrea...

She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page th...

You still know that boy. He was very angry at fourteen, fifteen, in summer and winter, at home or in...

Why shouldn’t your curiosity about the world be rewarded?

So many of the things I invented I honestly did for fun, out of some perverse game of whether or not...

Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know.--After I Was Thro...

This democracy thing, or Demoxie, whatever it is, good god. Under the guise of having every voice he...

He must trust, and he must have faith. And so he builds, because what is building, and rebuilding an...

Love is implicit in every connection. It should be. Thus when absent it makes us insane. (You Shall ...

[The long ride to Riyadh]When I first travelled, I was naive, sloppy, wide-eyed, and nothing happene...

You better [start writing] now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have thi...

When you're in your twenties in a new city where no one's from here, we're all sort of orphans. The ...

The issue is complex, but like many matters in Sudan, it is not as complex as Khartoum would want th...