Dave Eggers Quotes

92 Sourced Quotes

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

Dave Eggers
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
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
We cannot fathom why people would stand across the street, easily a hundred feet away, when they could be so close, near us.
'Suckers.' I tell Toph, thumbing toward those watching from so far away. It is important, I feel, that the boy knows what suckers look like.

Dave Eggers
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.

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

Dave Eggers
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
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.

Dave Eggers
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.

Dave Eggers
We sleep when we fall. We only sleep when we can't move anymore. That's juvenile. But it means everything. It's the illusion of progress. Staying awake isn't progress. The illusion is enough.

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

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

Dave Eggers
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
In all my life I'd never been approached this way, the car pulling up, the Where you going? It was something I wish had happened hundreds of times. I was a looker - someone who looked over at every car at every traffic light, hoping something would happen, and almost never finding anyone looking back - always everyone looking forwards, and every time I felt stupid. Why should people look at you? Why should they care?

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

Dave Eggers
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
But what I really want is to just swim around in a warm baby pool of these friends, jump in their dry leaf pile-to rub them all over myself, without words and clothes.

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

Dave Eggers
Ooh, look at me, I'm Dave, I'm writing a book! With all my thoughts in it. La la la!

Dave Eggers
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.

Dave Eggers
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
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

Dave Eggers
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 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.

Dave Eggers
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
You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me.

Dave Eggers
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?

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

Dave Eggers
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