quotes by Dave Eggers

"Still though, I think if you're not self-obsessed, you're probably boring."
— Dave Eggers

"We are unusual and tragic and alive."
— Dave Eggers

"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)

"It is no way to live, to wait to love."
— 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)

"All I ever wanted was to know what to do."
— Dave Eggers (You Shall Know Our Velocity!)

"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)

"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)

"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)

""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)

"...And there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people."
— Dave Eggers (You Shall Know Our Velocity!)

"3. There are bears and there are small dogs. Be strong like bear! If they take out your teeth, sit on the dogs. Bears always forget they can just sit on the dogs. Sit on the dogs."
— Dave Eggers (You Shall Know Our Velocity)

"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)

"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!)

"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)

"We see the beauty within and cannot say no."
— Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)

"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)

"And we will be ready, at the end of every day will be ready, will not say no to anything, will try to stay awake while everyone is sleeping, will not sleep, will make the shoes with the elves, will breathe deeply all the time, breathe in all the air full of glass and nails and blood, will breathe it and drink it, so rich, so when it comes we will not be angry, will be content, tired enough to go, gratefully, will shake hands with everyone, bye, bye, and then pack a bag, some snacks, and go to the volcano."
— Dave Eggers

"I see colors like you hear jet planes."
— Dave Eggers (How We Are Hungry)

"Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot."
— Dave Eggers (What Is the What)

"Goddamn sometimes I only want this feeling to stay and last."
— Dave Eggers (How We Are Hungry)

"I wanted so many times while driving to flip, to skid and flip and fall from the car and have something happen. I wanted to land on my head and lose half of it, or land on my legs and lose one or both. I wanted something to happen so my choices would be fewer, so my map would have a route straight through, in red. I wanted limitations, boundaries, to ease the burden; because the agony, Jack, when we were up there in the dark, was in the silence! All I ever wanted was to know what to do. In these last months I've had no clue, I've been paralyzed by the quiet, and for a moment something spoke to me, and we came here, or came to Africa, and intermittently there were answers, intermittently there was a chorus and they sang to us and pointing, and were watching and approving, but just as often there was silence, and we stood blinking under the sun, or under the black sky, and we had to think of what to do next."
— Dave Eggers (You Shall Know Our Velocity!)

"But criticism, for the most part, comes from the opposite place that book-enjoying should come from. To enjoy art one needs time, patience, and a generous heart, and criticism is done, by and large, by impatient people who have axes to grind. The worst sort of critics are (analogy coming) butterfly collectors - they chase something, ostensibly out of their search for beauty, then, once they get close, they catch that beautiful something, they kill it, they stick a pin through its abdomen, dissect it and label it. The whole process, I find, is not a happy or healthy one. Someone with his or her own shit figured out, without any emotional problems or bitterness or envy, instead of killing that which he loves, will simply let the goddamn butterfly fly, and instead of capturing and killing it and sticking it in a box, will simply point to it - "Hey everyone, look at that beautiful thing" - hoping everyone else will see the beautiful thing he has seen. Just as no one wants to grow up to be an IRS agent, no one should want to grow up to maliciously dissect books. "
— Dave Eggers

"We lose weeks like buttons, like pencils."
— 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

"Why did we do that to Pluto? We had it good with Pluto."
— Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)

"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 (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)

"Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane."
— Dave Eggers (You Shall Know Our Velocity!)

"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

"There's nothing to be gained from passive observance, the simple documenting of conditions, because, at its core, it sets a bad example. Every time something is observed and not fixed, or when one has a chance to give in some way and does not, there is a lie being told, the same lie we all know by heart but which needn't be reiterated.”"
— 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 (What Is the What)

"I was feeling everything too much. Everything pulled at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools."
— Dave Eggers (You Shall Know Our Velocity!)

"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)

"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!)

"When there is pleasure, there is often abandon, and mistakes are made."
— Dave Eggers (What Is the What)

"Up there we see everything, Oakland to the left, El Cerrito and Richmond to the right, Marin forward, over the Bay, Berkeley below, all red rooftops and trees of cauliflower and columbine, shaped like rockets and explosions, all those people below us, with humbler views; we see the Bay Bridge, clunkety, the Richmond Bridge, straight, low, the Golden Gate, red toothpicks and string, the blue between, the blue above, the gleaming white Land of the Lost/Superman's North Pole Getaway magic crystals that are San Francisco."
— Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)

"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

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

"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 few difficult days, and every person who has entered my path during these awful morning hours, because to do anything less would be something less than human. 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 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)

"How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting."
— Dave Eggers (You Shall Know Our Velocity!)

"His lies were so exquisite I almost wept."
— Dave Eggers (What Is the What)

"I had the sensation that I might always be running like this, that I would always have to run, and that I would always be able to run."
— Dave Eggers (What Is the What)

"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

"This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love."
— Dave Eggers

"He wanted to fly in lightweight contraptions with her."
— Dave Eggers

"If you think I'm annoying and preachy now, you should have known me in grade school."
— 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 shoes shile the children sleep."
— Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)

"At that moment I was sure. That I belonged in my skin. That my organs were mine and my eyes were mine and my ears, which could only hear the silence of this night and my faint breathing, were mine, and I loved them and what they could do."
— Dave Eggers