Top 204 Quotes & Sayings by Dave Eggers - Page 2

I always like the idea of doing interviews with somebody but completely seriously not ever mentioning what that person is generally known for.

When I was on the bestseller list with the first book, everyone who knows me knows that every week it continued to be on the list was a very dark week for me. Everyone knows that all I wanted was to be off that list.

I'll always be working on five things at once, usually with those documents open at the same time because if I get stuck somewhere I'll jump over to something else. That's how my head has always worked.

Also, I need deadlines, just like everybody else, especially coming from magazines, newspapers, and stuff like that. I need daily or weekly deadlines to get stuff done, or I continue to do things and not go off on a year of unproductivity.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I see colors like you hear jet planes.

Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.

If your hand doesn't work for it, your heart doesn't feel sorry for it.

My head was a condemned church with a ceiling of bats, but I swung from this dark mood to euphoria when I thought about leaving.

Be strong, be brave, be true. Endure.

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

The pain is not great. But the symbolism is disagreeable.

For years I feared the opening of every elevator, half-convinced that from the opened doors would come a bullet, for me, shot by a man in a tan trenchcoat. I have no idea why I feared this, expected it to happen. I even knew how I would react to this bullet coming from the elevator door, what word I would say. That word was: Finally.

We lose weeks like buttons, like pencils.

It is no way to live, to wait to love.

Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year.

I was feeling everything too much. Everything pulled at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools.

We see the beauty within and cannot say no.

Once a year, she remembers that she is insignificant. Then she forgets agains, because more than she is insignificant, she is forgetful.

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

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.

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.

No one’s forcing you to do this. You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You’re at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you’re staring at a screen, searching for strangers in Dubai.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing.

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.

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.

Every time my brain parks the car neatly in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage.

Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot. Though it causes me frequent pain, I find it very easy to place myself in the shoes of almost any boy, and can conjure my own youth with an ease that is troublesome.

Every time a crime was committed by a Muslim, that person's faith was mentioned, regardless of its relevance. When a crime is committed by a Christian, do they mention his religion? ... When a crime is committed by a black man, it's mentioned in the first breath: 'An African American man was arrested today...' But what about German Americans? Anglo Americans? A white man robs a convenience store and do we hear he's of Scottish descent? In no other instance is the ancestry mentioned.

Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

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.

When we pass by another person without telling them we love them it’s cruel and wrong and we all know this.

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.

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

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.

I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I'd lose my mind.

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.

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.

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 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.

The raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can't cut corners.

There is travel and there are babies; everything else is drudgery and death.

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

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.

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

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.

We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.

My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance--this is why people tell me secrets--my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is ever lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound.

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.