Dave Eggers Quotes

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

“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 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”

“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.”

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

“First of all, Iit’s all people like you. And that’s what’s so scary. you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“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.”

“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 beign seen, or heard, even for a moment.”

“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 forward, and every time I felt stupid. Why should people look over at you? Why would they care?”

“We are unusual and tragic and alive.”

“But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.”

“All I ever wanted was to know what to do.”

“We lose weeks like buttons, like pencils.”

“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.”

“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.”

“His lies were so exquisite I almost wept.”

“We see the beauty within and cannot say no.”

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

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

“Why do you want to be on The Real World?
-Because I want everyone to witness my youth

Why?
-Isn't it gorgeous?”

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

“If you don't want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You're taking up space, air.”

“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.”

“Goddamn sometimes I only want this feeling to stay and last.”

“I see colors like you hear jet planes.”

“Why did we do that to Pluto? We had it good with Pluto.”

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

“When there is pleasure, there is often abandon, and mistakes are made.”

“Be strong, be brave, be true. Endure.”

“You sit at a desk twelve hours a day and you have nothing to show for it except some numbers that won't exist or be remembered in a week. You're leaving no evidence you lived. There's no proof.”

“Thank you," he says.
"Thank who?"
"I don't know. You?"
"No, not me.."
"Thank you, Jesus?"
"Yes, Toph, Jesus died for your Christmas fun.”

“I was feeling everything too much. Everything was pulling at my eyes.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane.”

“It all meant something. Until it didn't.”

“How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.”

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

“my feeling is that if you're not self-obsessed you're probably boring.”

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

“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.”

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

“Yes, a dark time passed over this land, but now there is something like light.”

“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.”

“He must trust, and he must have faith. And so he builds, because what is building, and rebuilding and rebuilding again, but an act of faith?”

“You see pictures of Buddha and he’s sitting, reclining, at peace. The Hindus have their twelve-armed elephant god, who also seems so content but not powerless. But leave it to Christians to have a dead and bloody man nailed to a cross.”

“We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“What is building, and rebuilding and rebuilding again, but an act of faith?”

“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.”

“You’re like part human, part rainbow.”

“I live because I do not exist.”

“You and yours at the Circle, you're gonna save all the souls. You're gonna get everyone in one place, you're gonna teach them all the same things. There can only be one morality, one set of rules. Imagine! Now all humans will have the eyes of God. You know this passage? 'All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of God.' Something like that. You know your Bible? Now we're all God. Every one of us will soon be able to see, and cast judgment upon, every other. We'll see what He sees. We'll articulate His judgment. We'll channel His wrath and deliver His forgiveness. On a constant and global level. All religion has been waiting for this, when every human is a direct and immediate messenger of God's will. Do you see what I'm saying?”

“Listen John—’
‘Who’s John?’
‘You’re John.’
‘I’m John?’
‘Yeah, I changed your name.”

“If there's a locked door, I start to make up all kinds of stories about what might be behind it. I feel like it's some kind of secret, and it leads to me making up lies. But if all the doors are open, physically and metaphorically, there's only the one truth.”

“Mr. Churchill you were given a mission.
— Yes
— I want to have been given your mission. I want your place in world events, the centrality of it. You were born in the cradle of a catapult!
— You are wrong. I found my mission.
— I disagree.
— If you must.
— Tell me: where is my mission? Where are my bunkers and trenches, my goddamn Gallipoli?”