Dave Eggers > Quotes

“This morning there s first a predictable story about Darfur; an expert on African affairs notes that seven thousand African Union troops patrolling a region the size of France have been ineffectual in preventing continued janjaweed terror. Funding for the troops is about to run out, and it seems that no one, including the United States, is ready to put forth more money or come up with new ideas to stop the killing and displacement. This is not surprising to those of us who lived through twenty years of oppression by the hands of Khartoum and its militias.”
― Dave Eggers, What Is the What

“The work of man is done behind the back of the natural world. When nature notices, and can muster the energy, it wipes the slate clean again.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“I can't believe he's going to make me give him the speech. I am livid that he's going to make me give him the speech. I do it, piecing it together from times I've seen it done on TV and in movies. I tell him that there are many people who love him and would be crushed if he were to kill himself, while wondering, distantly, if that is the truth. I tell him that he has so much potential, that he has so many things to do, while most of me believes that he will never put his body and brain to much use at all. I tell him that we all have dark periods, while becoming ever more angry at him, the theatrics, the self-pity, all this, when he has everything. He has a complete sort of freedom, with no parents and no dependents, with money and no immediate threats of pain or calamity. He is the 99.9th percentile, as I am. He has no real obligations, can go anywhere at any moment, sleep anywhere, move at will, and still he is wasting everyone's time with this. But I hold that back--I will save that for later--and instead say nothing but the most rapturous and positive things. And though I do not believe much of it, he does. I make myself sick saying it all, everything so obvious, the reasons to live not at all explainable in a few minutes on the edge of a psychiatric ward bed, but still he is roused, making me wonder even more about him, why a fudge-laden pep talk can convince him to live, why he insists on bringing us both down here, to this pedestrian level, how he cannot see how silly we both look, and when, exactly, it was that his head got so soft, when I lost track of him, how it is that I know and care about such a soft and pliant person, where was it again that I parked my car.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it's fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it.”
― Dave Eggers

“He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys whoa re part wolf and part wind do not get cold.”
― Dave Eggers, The Wild Things

“Who says we don’t want to be inspired? We fucking want to be inspired! What the fuck is wrong with us wanting to be inspired? Everyone acts like it’s some crazy idea, some outrageous ungrantable request. Don’t we deserve grand human projects that give us meaning?”
― Dave Eggers, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?

“Secrets are the enablers of antisocial, immoral and destructive behavior.”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“We have no choice. We need the communion of souls and only here are they awake.”
― Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“He tried to calm his thoughts, but everything came back to what he'd almost done. Because he hadn't done anything, for years or ever, he had almost done this. Because he had no stories of valor, he had almost done this. Because the efforts he'd made towards creating something like a legacy had failed, he had almost done this.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“Outside the walls of the Circle, all was noise and struggle, failure and filth. But here, all had been perfected. The best people had made the best systems and the best systems had reaped funds, unlimited funds,”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“But without William K, I would have forgotten that I had not been born on this journey. That I had lived before this.”
― Dave Eggers, What Is the What

“You still know that boy. He was very angry at fourteen, fifteen, in summer and winter, at home or in the world. So angry that his face contorted in photos. The camera was a question and his face did not know the answer.”
― Dave Eggers, How the Water Feels to the Fishes

“Kit, you know the key to relating to your parents now? It’s mercy. Children, when they become teenagers and then young adults, grow unforgiving. Anything but perfection is pathos. Children are judgmental on an Old Testament level. All errors are unforgivable, as if a contract of perfection has been broken. But what if one’s parents are granted the same mercy, the same empathy as other humans? Children need more Jesus in them.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“It's not human. It's not primal. So we don't understand it. It's a more recent mutation. The things we all have, love and hate and passion, and the need to eat and yell and screw, these are things every human has. But there's this new mutation, this ability to stand between a human being and some small measure of justice and blame it on some regulation. To say that the form was filled out incorrectly.”
― Dave Eggers, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?

“And there was a wonderful thing that tended to happen, something that felt like poetic justice: every time someone started shouting about the supposed monopoly of the Circle, or the Circle’s unfair monetization of the personal data of its users, or some other paranoid and demonstrably false claim, soon enough it was revealed that that person was a criminal or deviant of the highest order. One was connected to a terror network in Iran. One was a buyer of child porn. Every time, it seemed, they would end up on the news, footage of investigators leaving their homes with computers, on which any number of unspeakable searches had been executed and where reams of illegal and inappropriate materials were stored. And it made sense. Who but a fringe character would try to impede the unimpeachable improvement of the world?”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“Our town was rigid in many ways, in terms of the uniformity of things, the colors of skin, the makes of cars, the lushness of the lawns, but on top of that it was sort of a blank canvas, so -- and again, I guess this is true of any child -- I was ready to quickly accept the sudden and total substitutions of all I knew to be true.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Dear Producers,
Something is radiating deep within me and it must be transmitted or I will implode and the world will suffer a great loss, unawares. Epic are the proportions of my soul, yet without a scope who cares am I? This is why I must but must be one of the inhabitants of MTV's "Real World." Only there, burning brightly into a million dazzled eyes, will my as yet uncontoured self assume the beauteous forms that are not just its own, but an entire market niche's, due.

I am a Kirk Cameron-Kurt Cobain figure, roguishly quirky, dandified but down to earth, kooky but comprehensible; denizen of the growing penumbra between alternative and mainstream culture; angsty prophet of the already bygone apocalypse, yet upbeat, stylish and sexy!

Oscar Wilde wrote, "Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating... [they] live the poetry [they] cannot write." As with Dorian Gray, life is my art! Oh MTV, take me, make me, wake me from my formless slumbers and place me in the dreamy Real World of target marketing.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“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

“Toph looks at me. I nod gravely. In this world, in our new world, there will be rocking. We will pay tribute to musicmakers like Journey, particularly if this is Two-for-Tuesday, which means inevitably that one of the songs will be: Just a small-town girl...”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Nicaragua sounded dangerous; she liked the word. Nicaragua! It sounded like some kind of spider. There it goes, under the table - Nicaragua!”
― Dave Eggers, How We Are Hungry

“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.”
― Dave Eggers

“None of this I'd mine. My father is not mine- not in that way. His death and what he's done are not mine. Nor are my upbringing not my town nor its tragedies. How can these things be mine? Holding me responsible for keeping hidden this information is ridiculous. I was born into a town and a family and the town and my family happened to me. I own none of it. It's everyone's.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“I was born into a town and a family and the town ad my family happened to me. I own none of it. It is everyone's. It is shareware. I like it, I like having been a part of it, I would kill or die to protect those who are part of it, but I don not claim exclusivity. Have it Take it from me. Do with is what you will. Make it useful. This is like making electricity from dirt; it is almost too good to be believed, that we can make beauty from this stuff.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Don’t you think if someone like me, someone who invented most of this shit, is scared, don’t you think you should be scared, too?”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“His mind seemed barely tethered to his body, much less the earth.”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“the gimmickry is simply a device, a defense, to obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole story, which is both too black and blinding to look at ---avert your eyes!--- but nevertheless useful, at least to the author, even in caricatured or condensed form, because telling as many people as possible about it helps, he thinks, to dilute the pain and bitterness and thus facilitate its flushing from his soul”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“I prefer the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it’s more bare, more hollow. 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 the children sleep.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“What he had was a sense that few things mattered much. That few people are to be feared. And so he now faced all such situations with a sense of exhausted resolve, and he dealt with everything head-on.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“Oh I could be out, rollicking in the ripeness of my flesh and others’, could be drinking things and eating things and rubbing mine against theirs, speculating about this person or that, waving, indicating hello with a sudden upward jutting of my chin, sitting in the backseat of someone else’s car, bumping up and down the San Francisco hills, south of Market, seeing people attacking their instruments, afterward stopping at a bodega, parking, carrying the bottles in a paper bag, the glass clinking, all our faces bright, glowing under streetlamps, down the sidewalk to this or that apartment party, hi, hi, putting the bottles in the fridge, removing one for now, hating the apartment, checking the view, sitting on the arm of a couch and being told not to, and then waiting for the bathroom, staring idly at that ubiquitous Ansel Adams print, Yosemite, talking to a short-haired girl while waiting in the hallway, talking about teeth, no reason really, the train of thought unclear, asking to see her fillings, no, really, I’ll show you mine first, ha ha, then no, you go ahead, I’ll go after you, then, after using the bathroom she is still there, still in the hallway, she was waiting not just for the bathroom but for me, and so eventually we’ll go home together, her apartment, where she lives alone, in a wide, immaculate railroad type place, newly painted, decorated with her mother, then sleeping in her oversized, oversoft white bed, eating breakfast in her light-filled nook, then maybe to the beach for a few hours with the Sunday paper, then wandering home whenever, never-
Fuck. We don't even have a baby-sitter.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Kit, you say your mother hasn't changed, but she has. A hundred times she's changed. It's important to know with adults, thought there is continual development, there is not always improvement. There is change, but not necessarily growth.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King