Eggers Quotes & Sayings

We've sent over 180 million frowns from the U.S alone, and you can bet that has an effect on the regime. — Dave Eggers

It's the usual utopian vision. This time they were saying it'll reduce waste. If stores know what their customers want, then they don't overproduce, don't overship, don't have to throw stuff away when it's not bought. I mean, like everything else you guys are pushing, it sounds perfect, sounds progressive, but it carries with it more control, more central tracking of everything we do. — Dave Eggers

You and I read the same books and hear the same sermons and we come away with different messages. That has to be evidence of some serious problem, right? — Dave Eggers

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

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

Because I grew up with this naive expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation. — Dave Eggers

We lose weeks like buttons, like pencils. — Dave Eggers

Are the kids at school?"
"No, they're in the lake. My God. — Dave Eggers

Having a matrix of preferences presented as your essence, as the whole you? Maybe that was it. It was some kind of mirror, but it was incomplete, distorted. — Dave Eggers

I wondered quickly if I'd give my life so that a dragon could live. If someone offered me that deal, your life for the existence of dragons.I thought maybe yes, maybe no. — Dave Eggers

So many people who wanted no part of all this. That's what's new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that's over. Completion is the end. We're closing the circle around everyone - it's a totalitarian nightmare. — Dave Eggers

I often cannot believe the things I do. — Dave Eggers

But see how we are the same? You and I, Will? We both see strangers and we react. We don't like to walk by people without nodding. We're broken when people are rude. We're broken when people can't meet us halfway. We can't accept the limits of normal relationships - chilly, clothed, circumscribed. Our hearts pull against their leashes, Will. — Dave Eggers

And worse, you're not doing anything interesting anymore. You're not seeing anything, saying anything. The weird paradox is that you think you're at the center of things, and that makes your opinions more valuable, but you yourself are becoming less vibrant. I bet you haven't done anything offscreen in months. Have you? — Dave Eggers

But I'm a believer in the perfectibility of human beings. I think we can be better. I think we can be perfect or near to it. And when we become our best selves, the possibilities are endless. We can solve any problem. We can cure any disease, end hunger, everything, because we won't be dragged down by all our weaknesses, our petty secrets, our hoarding of information and knowledge. We will finally realize our potential. — Dave Eggers

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

We want everyone to follow their dreams, their hearts (aren't they bursting, like ours?); we want them doing things that we will find interesting. — Dave Eggers

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

Alan tried to reassure her the same way he always had.
--I'm the eye in the say, he said. I can see where you started and where you're going and it looks perfectly fine from up here. — Dave Eggers

You treat a kid with respect and as an adult you talk to them as if they're smart people. But you don't throw at them the trappings of adulthood and you know, the darker stuff. — Dave Eggers

Your memory has always been given to opportunistic revision. — Dave Eggers

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy--Normal mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers--that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch. You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you. — William Zinsser

Every time a crime was committed by a Muslim, that person's faith was mentioned, regardless of its relevance. When a crime is committed by a Christian, do they mention his religion? ... When a crime is committed by a black man, it's mentioned in the first breath: 'An African American man was arrested today ... ' But what about German Americans? Anglo Americans? A white man robs a convenience store and do we hear he's of Scottish descent? In no other instance is the ancestry mentioned. — Dave Eggers

The voice of the nickly reflection of the moon was not as deep as you might expect. It was a singer's voice, though, a tenor, one that loved itself without reservation.
I feel time like you dream. Your dreams are jumbled. You can't remember the order of your dreams, and when you recall them, the memories bend. Faces change. It's all in puddles and ripples. That's what time is for me. — Dave Eggers

I just said, 'I hope she can get by with a salary of sixty thousand dollars.' — Dave Eggers

I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I'd like to see them again. And I'd love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there. — Dave Eggers

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

Not all good works can turn a profit, but profits can be directed toward good. As Warren Buffett explains, "I've worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions. — William D. Eggers

You know what I think? I think everyone should be able, just once, to make an inanimate object come to life and be his pal. Like an orange. Or a hammer. — Dave Eggers

The waterfall, and the tiki torches, all of these things the stuff of vacations and dreams and impossible to maintain, but then she knew - and this is what was keeping her up, her head careening with something like a toddler's joy - that she would be going back to that place, the place where all these things happened. She was welcome there, employed there. — Dave Eggers

The money that could have saved the Shuttle, and the money we send to random countries, that we use to remake unchangeable countries ten thousand miles away. — Dave Eggers

You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You're at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you're staring at a screen, — Dave Eggers

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

He was laughing now, and he knew she had a sense of humour, and she knew he did, too, and somehow he made her feel safe, made her trust that he would never bring it up again, that this terrible thing she said would remain between them, that they both understood mistakes are made by all and that they should, if everyone is acknowledging our common humanity, our common frailty and propensity for sounding and looking ridiculous a thousand times a day, that these mistakes should be allowed to be forgotten. — Dave Eggers

Some days he climbed over the foothills of indifference to see the landscape of his life and future for what it was: mappable, traversable, achievable. — Dave Eggers

He handed Mae a piece of paper, on which he'd written, in crude all capitals, a list of assertions under the headline "The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age." Mae scanned it, catching passages: "We must all have the right to anonymity." "Not every human activity can be measured." "The ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of any endeavour is catastrophic to true understanding." "The barrier between public and private must remain unbreachable." At the end she found one line, written in red ink: "We must all have the right to disappear. — Dave Eggers

There are many Saudi women doctors, and there are many wealthy and powerful and well-educated Saudi women who circumvent the restrictions put upon them, quietly or otherwise. — Dave Eggers

Every fucking suburb has a SWAT team. — Dave Eggers

-she'd never thought of him while in the tub or flat on her bed- but in his presence she didn't want to talk or eat, she wanted to be nude with him, under a dirty sheet in a borrowed house. She wanted to hold his shoulders; she wanted to go snowshoeing with him; she wanted to go to funerals with him; she wanted him to be the father of her children — Dave Eggers

What the fuck does it take to show you motherfuckers, what does it fucking take what do you want how much do you want because I am willing and I'll stand before you and I'll raise my arms and give you my chest and throat and wait, and I've been so old for so long, for you, for you, I want it fast and right through me
Oh do it, do it motherfuckers, do it do it you fuckers finally, finally, finally. — Dave Eggers

Some of the bank people were so young they'd never seen a business proposal suggesting manufacturing things in the state of Massachusetts. They thought they'd unearthed some ancient shaman, full of clues to a forgotten world. — Dave Eggers

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

The woman serving me was wearing a white sports bra that looked like it had been mauled by tigers
desert isle chic. — Dave Eggers

Director of Ensuring the Future — Dave Eggers

The heat was alive, predatory. — Dave Eggers

He's turned inside out, and is with the Sudanese to find out how to become right again. — Dave Eggers

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

That only having left could she and her children achieve something like sublimity, that without movement there is no struggle, and without struggle there is no purpose, and without purpose there is nothing at all. She wanted to tell every mother, every father: There is meaning in motion. — Dave Eggers

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

Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape. — Dave Eggers

Max had to think about these new developments. He hadn't liked getting hit by a rock
his stomach still ached from then rock Judith had thrown
but then again, when his team had used rocks on Alexander, it had caused him to surrender. Now the Bad Guys only had three soldiers left, which would make victory for Max's team more likely. So now it made perfect sense. He was wrong to ban rocks, or even animals. The key was to use all the weapons at one's disposal, but to just make sure you won when you used them. — Dave Eggers

We live in a vengeful time. You didn't get the orange chicken you ordered or the sticky rice? And now you're already home? Meaning you'd have to drive all the way back to get the orange chicken and sticky rice you ordered? Injustice! And thus avenge. Avenge the proprietor's crimes! This [is] our contemporary version of balance, of speaking truth to power. Avenge the proprietor on thy customer-review site! Right the imbalance! — Dave Eggers

Who were these people, all of them young couples, a few fabulous ones, tall thin-haired blondes with toned men in perfectly pressed jeans
neither fearing the loss of the other. — Dave Eggers

What would a brain do if not these sorts of exercises? I have no idea how people function without near-constant chaos. I'd lose my mind. — Dave Eggers

To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise. — Dave Eggers

Toph, I want to tell you something. I want to tell you about my nipples. I want to tell you about my nipples, and generally about the nipples of the men in our family. Because someday, son [I do this thing, and he does this thing, where I call him son and he calls me dad, when we are having funny father-son-type chats, mocking them in a way while also being secretly, deeply queasy about using these terms], someday my nipples will be your nipples. Someday you too will have nipples that protrude unnaturally far from your chest, and which will harden at the slightest provocation, preventing you from wearing anything but the heaviest cotton T-shirts. — Dave Eggers

It was just an idea I had, that it could be cool to have a book covered in fake fur. — Dave Eggers

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

So yeah, we put llamas everywhere. That was us. We just liked looking at them, so we bred about six million and spread them around. — 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

Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn't our parents tell us about the weight?
- What weight?
- The fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If we're vessels, and we are, then we, you and I, are overfull, and that means she's at the bottom of a deep cold lake. How can she stand the hissing of all that water?
- We are not vessels; we are missiles.
- We're static and we're empty. We are overfull and leaden.
- We are airtight and we are missiles and all-powerful. — Dave Eggers

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

You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it [dignity]. It's never dignified, always brutal. What's dignified about dying? It's never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. 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

To be described is to be seduced. Shit. One turn of phrase. One thing noticed that she'd never noticed. It works always. — Dave Eggers

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

Alan had never been stabbed or shot or punctured or broken. Were scars the best evidence of living? If we have not survived something, and thus were certain that we'd lived, we could scar ourselves, couldn't we? — Dave Eggers

You look at pictures of Nepal, push a smile button, and you think that's the same as going there. — Dave Eggers

You might not be able to operate your own Learjet and have an unlimited expense account, but if you have a reasonable expectation for a print-based product, whether it's a newspaper or a magazine, you can certainly exist. — Dave Eggers

I went to Dave Eggers with this idea of doing a movie about a guy going through some sort of Frank Capra-esque journey. — John Krasinski

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

Did children want sports cars for parents? No. They wanted Hondas. They wanted to know that the car would start in all seasons. — Dave Eggers

Eliminate lobbyists. Eliminate polls. It might even eliminate Congress. If we can know the will of the people at any time, without filter, without misinterpretation or bastardization, wouldn't it eliminate much of Washington? — Dave Eggers

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

I grew up north of Chicago, not far from where the Schwinn bicycle plant used to be, and was conscious of the fact that these beautiful, everlasting bikes were made just down the road. — Dave Eggers

The one big surprise is that as it turns out, God is the sun. It makes sense, if you think about it. Why we didn't see it sooner I cannot say. Every day the sun was right there burning, our and other planets hovering around it, always apologizing and we didn't think it was God. Why would there be a God and also a sun? Of course God is the sun.
Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know. — Dave Eggers

When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes. — Dave Eggers

Their howls rose to the sky and twisted together until they were on, and the other beasts joined in too, all of their voices creating a wild, plaintive song of sorry and abandon and anger and love. — Dave Eggers

What had been intriguing on Monday and Tuesday was approaching annoying by Wednesday and exasperating by Thursday. — Dave Eggers

But it felt good to cry, to let her shoulders shake, to feel the hot tears on her face, to taste their baby salt, to wipe snot all over the underside of her shirt. — Dave Eggers

Memory, perhaps, should have no physical shape. — 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

When I'm doing work online or on the computer, it's one thing. When I want to read, I want to go elsewhere, and I want to be away from the screen. — Dave Eggers

This was uncalled for. — 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

I think you think that sitting at your desk, frowning and smiling somehow makes you think you're actually living some fascinating life. You comment on things, and that substitutes for doing them. You look at pictures of Nepal, push a smile button, and you think that's the same as going there. I mean, what would happen if you actually went? Your CircleJerk ratings or whatever-the-fuck would drop below an acceptable level! Mae, do you realize how incredibly boring you've become? — Dave Eggers

I was trying to make the web more civil. I was trying to make it more elegant. I got rid of anonymity. I combined a thousand disparate elements into one unified system. But I didn't picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where all government and all life was channeled through one network. — Dave Eggers

Thank you," he says.
"Thank who?"
"I don't know. You?"
"No, not me. Jesus."
"Thank you, Jesus?"
"Yes, Toph, Jesus died for your Christmas fun. — Dave Eggers

Public-private leads to private-private, and soon you have the Circle running most or even all government services, — 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

He had made a series of foolish decisions in his life. He had not planned well. He had not had courage when he needed it. His decisions had been short sighted. The decisions of his peers had been short sighted. These decisions had been foolish and expedient. — Dave Eggers

Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal. — Dave Eggers

Recently, I've discovered Radiohead and find them to be quite good. So clearly, I'm some kind of musical retard. (Jonathan Ames, Middle-American Gothic) — Dave Eggers

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

Loud it is in here? You hear the echo? - Help! Help! - I'm so disappointed in you, Kev. — Dave Eggers

I still get my news from the newspaper in the morning. I just have an affection for paper, and that's no secret, I guess. — Dave Eggers

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

I know forever they will be in my house, the rooms of my mind, I know this and I have accepted this but while I know they will be there I want them dead there. I cannot have them breathing there! I want them in the floirboards of the basement of my soul. — Dave Eggers

Revelation is everything, not for its own sake, because most self-revelation is just garbage
oop!
yes, but we have to purge the garbage, toss it out, throw it into a bunker and burn it, because it is fuel. It's fossil fuel. And what do we do with fossil fuel? Why, we dump it into a bunker and burn it, of course. No, we don't do that. But you get my meaning. It's endlessly renewable, usable without diminishing one's capacity to create more. — Dave Eggers

I've never had WiFi at home. I'm too easily distracted, and YouTube is too tempting. — Dave Eggers