Top 204 Quotes & Sayings by Dave Eggers - Page 3

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Dave Eggers.
Last updated on December 2, 2024.
In hospitals I feel palpable comfort. I feel the competence, the expertise, so much education and money, all of the supplies sterile, everything packaged, sealed tight. My fears evaporate when the automatic doors shush open.
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.
All I ever wanted was to know what to do. — © Dave Eggers
All I ever wanted was to know what to do.
My parents told me they were going to kill me at least a thousand times growing up. "I'm gonna kill you," and then they'd whack me on the side of the head or whatever. And "What's wrong with you?" And "I'm gonna lock you up," and "I'm gonna throw you out the window," and "I'm gonna kill you." You know, all these things that you say in the heat of a normal chaotic household.
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.
His lies were so exquisite I almost wept.
You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.
Hello Frances, I have just been to health class, and I was wondering how your feminine parts were developing.
But of course there's no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It's the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons
You know, it's been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher
He remained, weeks after awakening, in that period of early-morning consciousness that allows easy re-entry to dreaming. His limbs still tingled with the residue of sleep, and most days he wanted badly to allow it to overtake him again.
It all meant something. Until it didn't.
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?
Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, The Things They Carried, has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction. — © Dave Eggers
Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, The Things They Carried, has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.
There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in coastal Louisiana
But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it’s here that we need to be.
A combination of acting, lying, begging, and cheating.
She pulls away, pats me on the shoulder with three mini-pats, like those used to pet reptiles.
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.
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.
They were so in love with the world, and so disappointed in every aspect of it.
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.
How many times in life can we make decisions that are important but will not hurt anyone? Are we obligated- maybe we are- to say yes to any choice when no one will be hurt? We use the word hurt when talking about things like this because when these things go wrong it can feel as if you were hit in the sternum by a huge animal that's run for miles just to strike you.
Nothing again. No one is listening. No one is waiting to hear the kicking of a man above. It is unexpected. You have no ears for someone like me.
Now I'm in nonfiction. To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way. There's always that matching of the content and the form, and that means everything to me. I spend years thinking about what that match is going to be before I can really make it work.
We were fools and now we were driving to our deaths in a rental car. Janet Jackson was tinkling from the speakers, asking what we had done for her as of late
WHEN we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don't blame the soldiers.
Why did we do that to Pluto? We had it good with Pluto.
Yes, a dark time passed over this land, but now there is something like light.
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.
Why do you want to be on The Real World? Because I want everyone to witness my youth. Why? Isn't it gorgeous?
If you don't want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You're taking up space, air.
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.
Maybe he was more than the sum of his broken parts.
We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.
Then he got more books. He saved all the books.
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
When there is pleasure, there is often abandon, and mistakes are made. — © Dave Eggers
When there is pleasure, there is often abandon, and mistakes are made.
Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.
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)
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.
If you think I'm annoying and preachy now, you should have known me in grade school.
Why do we pursue information that we know will never leave our heads?
Morning comes like a scream through a pinhole.
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.
I often cannot believe the things I do.
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.
Why shouldn’t your curiosity about the world be rewarded?
Maybe he hadn't thought the war through. It had seemed like simple fun when he had first pictured it, with a glorious beginning, a difficult but valor-filled middle, and a victorious end. He hadn't accounted for the fact that there might not be much of a resolution to the battle, and he hadn't imagined what it would feel like when the war just sort of ended, without anyone admitting defeat and congratulating him for his bravery.
I always had a hard time with fiction. It does feel like driving a car in a clown suit. You're going somewhere, but you're in costume, and you're not really fooling anybody. You're the guy in costume, and everybody's supposed to forget that and go along with you. Obviously, it can work, it works all the time - well, it doesn't always work. Still, no matter what, I'm always looking at the form and addressing it, not ignoring it.
One might think that a boy who was out in the snow for so long would get cold, but Max was not. He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys who are part wolf and part wind do not get cold.
Write your goddamned book now. The world awaits. — © Dave Eggers
Write your goddamned book now. The world awaits.
How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.
You're breaking out of character, again.
This boy thinks I am not of his species, that I am some other kind of creature, one that can be crushed under the weight of a phone book. The pain is not great, but the symbolism is disagreeable.
She felt some measure of relief knowing that in the very least, on the open road she would have some time to think.
Nonfiction narratives are really powerful and valid in themselves. But one thing that you don't get sometimes from the more clinical or academic books or nonfiction books is that you don't get to hear the person's voice; you don't get them as individuals. You get a few quotes and you hear them as sort of a case study: numbers, examples, anecdotes, maybe a paragraph here, and that's about it.
But that's one lifetime." Yeah." But while doing that one I'd want to be able to have done other stuff. Whole other lives- the one where I sail-" I know, on a boat you made yourself.
He wanted to fly in lightweight contraptions with her.
Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane.
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