Dave Eggers famous quotes

We are unusual and tragic and alive.
-- Dave Eggers

#Alive #Unusual #Tragic

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.
-- Dave Eggers

#Powerful #Book #Voice

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.
-- Dave Eggers

#Love #Carpe Diem #Thinking

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

#Book #Unique #Stopping

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.
-- Dave Eggers

#Matter #Disappear

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.
-- Dave Eggers

#Watches #Use #Minutes

We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.
-- Dave Eggers

#Would Be #Absurd #Extraordinary Things

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.
-- Dave Eggers

#Running #Might #Able

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.
-- Dave Eggers

#Wall #Phones #Very Happy

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

#Eye #Looks #Youth

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

#Taken #Life Is

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

#Dog #Strong #Teeth

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

#Fall #Ambition #Luxury

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.
-- Dave Eggers

#Book #Thinking #Depth

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

#Eye #Feelings #Floating

It is no way to live, to wait to love.
-- Dave Eggers

#Waiting #Way

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.
-- Dave Eggers

#Loss #Past #Soul

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.
-- Dave Eggers

#Pain #Color #Wings

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

#Lying #Book #Mean

Morning comes like a scream through a pinhole.
-- Dave Eggers

#Morning #Scream

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.
-- Dave Eggers

#Regret #Past #Doe

Be strong, be brave, be true. Endure.
-- Dave Eggers

#Strong #Brave #Endure

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.
-- Dave Eggers

#Smart #Kids #Light

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

#Home #People #Able

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

#Healing #Eye #Night

He wanted to fly in lightweight contraptions with her.
-- Dave Eggers

#Wanted

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

#Paper #Matter #Majority

Nothing again. No one is listening. No one is waiting to hear the kicking of a man above. It is unexpected. You have no ears for someone like me.
-- Dave Eggers

#Men #Waiting #Listening

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.
-- Dave Eggers

#Pain #Book #Boys

Every part of my body felt electric. My chest ached and my head throbbed with the great terrible limitless possibility of the morning, and when it came, the sky was washed white, everything was new, and I hadn't slept at all.
-- Dave Eggers

#Morning #Sky #White

I see colors like you hear jet planes.
-- Dave Eggers

#Color #Jet Planes #Like You

Why did we do that to Pluto? We had it good with Pluto.
-- Dave Eggers

#Pluto

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

#Air #Getting Older #Arms

Yes, a dark time passed over this land, but now there is something like light.
-- Dave Eggers

#Dark #Light #Land

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

#Dark #Leaving #Church

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.
-- Dave Eggers

#Phones #Talking #People

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

#Doors #Comfort #Competence

She pulls away, pats me on the shoulder with three mini-pats, like those used to pet reptiles.
-- Dave Eggers

#Pet #Three #Reptiles

GOD: I own you like I own the caves. THE OCEAN: Not a chance. No comparison. GOD: I made you. I could tame you. THE OCEAN: At one time, maybe. But not now. GOD: I will come to you, freeze you, break you. THE OCEAN: I will spread myself like wings. I am a billion tiny feathers. You have no idea what's happened to me.
-- Dave Eggers

#Ocean #Wings #Ideas

Love is implicit in every connection. It should be. Thus when absent it makes us insane. (You Shall Know Our Velocity)
-- Dave Eggers

#Love Is #Insane #Connections

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

#Doors #Giving #Chaos

You're breaking out of character, again.
-- Dave Eggers

#Character

So I should be aware of the dangers of self-consciousness, but at the same time, I’ll be plowing through the fog of all these echoes, plowing through mixed metaphors, noise, and will try to show the core, which is still there, as a core, and is valid, despite the fog. The core is the core is the core. There is always the core, that can’t be articulated. Only caricatured.
-- Dave Eggers

#Self #Echoes #Fog

Once a year, she remembers that she is insignificant. Then she forgets agains, because more than she is insignificant, she is forgetful.
-- Dave Eggers

#Years #Remember #Forget

His lies were so exquisite I almost wept.
-- Dave Eggers

#Lying #Deceit #Exquisite

I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it's hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so – this has always been my dream – so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while children sleep.
-- Dave Eggers

#Life #Dream #Children

All I ever wanted was to know what to do.
-- Dave Eggers

#Wanted

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

#Real #World #Want

And we will be ready, at the end of every day will be ready, will not say no to anything, will try to stay awake while everyone is sleeping, will not sleep, will make the shoes with the elves, will breathe deeply all the time, breathe in all the air full of glass and nails and blood, will breathe it and drink it, so rich, so when it comes we will not be angry, will be content, tired enough to go, gratefully, will shake hands with everyone, bye, bye, and then pack a bag, some snacks, and go to the volcano.
-- Dave Eggers

#Sleep #Tired #Shoes

But the grind has begun. The windows don’t open, and even the availability of near-constant jokes about Jews and Mormons fails to stem the tide of frustration, decay. We’ve reached the end of pure inspiration, and are now somewhere else, something implying routine, or doing something because people expect us to do it, going somewhere each day because we went there the day before, saying things because we have said them before, and this seems like the work of a different sort of animal, contrary to our plan, and this is very very bad.
-- Dave Eggers

#Inspiration #Frustration #Animal