Dave Eggers Quotes

92 Sourced Quotes

There's nothing to be gained from passive observance, the simple documenting of conditions, because, at its core, it sets a bad example. Every time something is observed and not fixed, or when one has a chance to give in some way and does not, there is a lie being told, the same lie we all know by heart but which needn't be reiterated.

Dave Eggers
It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar time, when we're losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Dave Eggers
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
We're best at the long high throws. Like when you take four or five steps and rip it— It's almost like a shotput approach, the steps, four or five quick, one over the other, kind of sideways-like—and then you slash away with that fucker, it's such a violent act, throwing that white thing, you're first cradling it to your breast and then you whip that fucker as hard as you can while keeping it level, keeping it straight, but otherwise with everything you can send with it you whip that fucker like it had blades on it and you wanted it to cut straight through the paperblue sky like a screen, rip through it and have it be blood and back space beyond.

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

Dave Eggers
Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot. Though it causes me frequent pain, I find it very easy to place myself in the shoes of almost any boy, and can conjure my own youth with an ease that is troublesome.

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

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

Dave Eggers
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
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
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.

Dave Eggers
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
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
There are people who meet strangers and people, like me, who know only those they've known from birth

Dave Eggers
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.

Dave Eggers
— Mr. Churchill you were given a mission.
— Yes
— I want to have been given your mission. I want your place in world events, the centrality of it. You were born in the cradle of a catapult!
— You are wrong. I found my mission.
— I disagree.
— If you must.
— Tell me: where is my mission? Where are my bunkers and trenches, my goddamn Gallipoli?

Dave Eggers
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
We've become a nation of indoor cats, he'd said. A nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers. Thank God these weren't the kind of Americans who settled this country. They were a different breed! They crossed the country in wagons with wooden wheels! People croaked along the way, and they barely stopped. Back then, you buried your dead and kept moving.

Dave Eggers
How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.

Dave Eggers
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
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.

Dave Eggers
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.

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

Dave Eggers
Hello Frances, I have just been to health class, and I was wondering how your feminine parts were developing.

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

Dave Eggers
Toph does not know the words, and I know few of the words, but you cannot fucking stop us from singing

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

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

Dave Eggers