A Hologram for the King Quotes

“Live long enough and you'll disappoint everyone. People think you're able to help them and usually you can't. And so it becomes a process of choosing the one or two people you try hardest not to disappoint. The person in my life I am determined not to disappoint is you.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“It all meant something. Until it didn't.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“The key thing is managed awareness of your role in the world and history. Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That's the best you can do.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“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, A Hologram for the King

“Maybe he was more than the sum of his broken parts.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“They were so in love with the world, and so disappointed in every aspect of it.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That's the best you can do.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“We've become a nation of indoor cats, he'd said. A nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers. Thank God these weren't the kind of Americans who settled this country. They were a different breed! They crossed the country in wagons with wooden wheels! People croaked along the way, and they barely stopped. Back then, you buried your dead and kept moving.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“The raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can't cut corners.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“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, A Hologram for the King

“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, A Hologram for the King

“The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard. It shifts and our cities fall; it sighs and the coasts are overtaken.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“Why was he alive on Earth? Very often the meaning was obscured. Very often it required some digging. The meaning of his life was an elusive stream of water hundreds of feet below the surface, and he would periodically drop a bucket down the well, fill it, bring it up and drink from it. But this did not sustain him for long.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“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

“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

“People don't like to be kept away from what they want. Especially when it appears within their reach. It makes one doubly angry.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“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

“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

“This is the peculiar problem of constant connectivity: any silence of more than a few hours provokes apocalyptic thoughts.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“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

“He was feeling buoyant, flexible. He wanted to go jogging. He stood. He couldn't go jogging. He called room service and ordered a basket of breads and pastries.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“There's no such thing as "The One", she once said. They were at dinner in Taipei, with a supplier and his wife. The couple had been married forty years. The idea that there's just one person in the world you're meant to be with, it's illogical, she said. She'd had a few drinks and was enjoying her own loud thoughts. The math just doesn't work! Who you end up with, it's really just an accident of proximity.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“There would be a time when the world created people stronger than them. When all of this got worked out. But until then there would be women and men like Hanne and Alan, who were imperfect and had no path toward perfection.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“Americans are born knowing everything and nothing. Born moving forward, quickly, or thinking they are.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“People worried about our passing over into some robotic state, but we were so much like robots already, programmed and easy to manipulate.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“Alan was feeling strong. He did two push-ups and felt stronger still.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“This had happened to him before - in an effort to disappear, he had made himself more conspicuous.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“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, A Hologram for the King

“There were people in the world for whom the world and its people were subjects on which to cast spells.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King