Dave Eggers Quotes

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

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.

Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?

We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.

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.

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.

Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot.

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

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

I see colors like you hear jet planes.

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

People are strange, but more than that, they're good. They're good first, then strange.

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.

Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a f@*$%load of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.

A funny thing happened on the way to utopia: We've turned into this surveillance society and become a race of spies, where we track our kids and we track our spouses and we track our friends. I think very soon there will be an obsolescence of trust, because it's much easier to access a person's location than it is to ask - or to trust.

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.

Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know- they'd trade it all to know they've been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered. We all know we die. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.

We see the beauty within and cannot say no.

Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time.

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.

She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite.

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.

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.

We're in an era where they've sanitized home life in movies to such a degree that there is a certain home life that might be true if you have two perfect parents, and a nanny, and a couple babysitters, and support, and lots of money, and there's no strain at home, or whatever. But for most people, there's strain, you know? There's a lot of pressure, things can't be perfect, parents can't be perfect all the time. There's a divorce, there's money issues, whatever. People work, so you don't always have these vast reserves of patience every time your kid goes crazy.