Best 228 quotes of Dave Eggers on MyQuotes

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.

A combination of acting, lying, begging, and cheating.

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.

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.

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.

And that's actually the brunt of what we do is, people going straight from their workplace, straight from home, straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands more students.

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.

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.

And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students.

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.

Because I grew up with this naive expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation.

Be strong, be brave, be true. Endure.

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

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

But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.

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.

But the grind has begun. The windows don’t open, and even the availability of near-constant jokes about Jews and Mormons fails to stem the tide of frustration, decay. We’ve reached the end of pure inspiration, and are now somewhere else, something implying routine, or doing something because people expect us to do it, going somewhere each day because we went there the day before, saying things because we have said them before, and this seems like the work of a different sort of animal, contrary to our plan, and this is very very bad.

But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren't going into the 'Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help' or something like that. It was 826 Valencia.

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.

But while mum and dad were incredibly caring, it was also a very chaotic household where everyone fought about everything. So I know what it's like to internalize all that chaos.

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

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.

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

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.

Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.

Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.

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

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.

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.

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

Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.

Hello Frances, I have just been to health class, and I was wondering how your feminine parts were developing.

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?

Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane.

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.

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.

High school teachers who want to get reluctant readers turned around need to give the students some say in the reading list. Make it collaborative: The students will feel ownership, and everyone will dig in.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I am a bike enthusiast; there's a certain amount of romance to bikes. They're both beautiful and utilitarian.

I am a freak in secondhand velour, a leper who uses L'Oreal Anti-sticky Mega Gel. I am rootless, ripped from all foundations, an orphan raising an orphan and wanting to take away everything there is and replace it with stuff I've made.

I don't mean to beat a made-in-America drum, but I would be lying if I said it doesn't feel somehow right to be printing books in the U.S.

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

I had grown up as a fan of Studs Terkel. In Chicago he sort of looms large and is mentioned often.

If you think I'm annoying and preachy now, you should have known me in grade school.

If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.