Dave Eggers > Quotes

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

“We are unusual and tragic and alive.”
― dave eggers

“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, What Is the What

“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, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.”
― Dave Eggers, What Is the What

“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, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Still though, I think if you're not self-obsessed, you're probably boring.”
― Dave Eggers

“All I ever wanted was to know what to do.”
― Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“We lose weeks like buttons, like pencils.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“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, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“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, You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“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, How We Are Hungry

“His lies were so exquisite I almost wept.”
― Dave Eggers, What Is the What

“Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot.”
― Dave Eggers, What Is the What

“We are the bright new stars born of a screaming black hole, the nascent suns burst from the darkness, from the grasping void of space that folds and swallows--a darkness that would devour anyone not as strong as we. We are oddities, sideshows, talk show subjects. We capture everyone's imagination.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“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, The Circle

“We see the beauty within and cannot say no.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“The only infallible truth of our lives is that everything we love in life will be taken from us.”
― 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, The Circle

“Whatever I do, however I find a way to live, I will tell these stories. I have spoken to every person I have encountered these last difficult days...I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive and so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.”
― Dave Eggers, What Is the What

“Because secrets do not increase in value if kept in a gore-ian lockbox, because one's past is either made useful or else mutates and becomes cancerous. We share things for the obvious reasons: it makes us feel un-alone, it spreads the weight over a larger area, it holds the possibility of making our share lighter. And it can work either way - not simply as a pain-relief device, but, in the case of not bad news but good, as a share-the-happy-things-I've-seen/lessons-I've-learned vehicle. Or as a tool for simple connectivity for its own sake, a testing of waters, a stab at engagement with a mass of strangers.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“It is no way to live, to wait to love.”
― 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, How the Water Feels to the Fishes

“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, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“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, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“It’s not that I’m not social. I’m social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you’re purveying. It improves nothing. It’s not nourishing. It’s like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You’re not hungry, you don’t need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you’re pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it’s equally addictive.”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“Once a year, she remembers that she is insignificant. Then she forgets agains, because more than she is insignificant, she is forgetful.”
― Dave Eggers, How the Water Feels to the Fishes

“All we really want is for no one to have a boring life, to be impressive, so we can be impressed. ~ on the friends we choose.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“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, You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“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, You Shall Know Our Velocity!