Dave Eggers Quotes

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

You treat a kid with respect and as an adult you talk to them as if they're smart people. But you don't throw at them the trappings of adulthood and you know, the darker stuff.

No one’s forcing you to do this. You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You’re at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you’re staring at a screen, searching for strangers in Dubai.

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?

They were so in love with the world, and so disappointed in every aspect of it.

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.

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

A funny thing happened on the way to utopia: We've turned into this surveillance society and become a race of spies, where we track our kids and we track our spouses and we track our friends. I think very soon there will be an obsolescence of trust, because it's much easier to access a person's location than it is to ask - or to trust.

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.

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.

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.

Paper is a uniquely beautiful format, more so than the web, I think: you need to invest in the aesthetics.

Write your goddamned book now. The world awaits.

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

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

His lies were so exquisite I almost wept.

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.

We see the beauty within and cannot say no.

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.

Why do we pursue information that we know will never leave our heads?

My voice and movements are restricted by the things I own.

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.

High school teachers who want to get reluctant readers turned around need to give the students some say in the reading list. Make it collaborative: The students will feel ownership, and everyone will dig in.

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

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.

When there is pleasure, there is often abandon, and mistakes are made.

Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know- they'd trade it all to know they've been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered. We all know we die. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.

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.

It was always difficult to get cattle returned once a marriage was dissolved.

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

I had grown up as a fan of Studs Terkel. In Chicago he sort of looms large and is mentioned often.

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

To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

This boy thinks I am not of his species, that I am some other kind of creature, one that can be crushed under the weight of a phone book. The pain is not great, but the symbolism is disagreeable.