Dave Eggers Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

I should probably get a stone. A stone would be good. A stone would save me, would salvage all the damage we had already done, all the things we had given up or lost.

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.

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

Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know.

-After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned

Americans are born knowing everything and nothing. Born moving forward, quickly, or thinking they are.

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?

Then he got more books. He saved all the books.

The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard.

This war has made racists of too many of the and too many of us, and it is the leadership in Khartoum that has stoked this fire, that has brought to the surface, and in some cases created from whole cloth, new hatreds that have bred unprecedented acts of brutality.

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.

Suffering is only suffering if it's done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.

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.

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.

Love is implicit in every connection. It should be. Thus when absent it makes us insane. (You Shall Know Our Velocity)