Quotes from Dave Eggers

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 would know that in any city, at an hour like this, there are people sleeping. That most people are sleeping. But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there are a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it's here that we need to be. That if we are living as we were this week, that we had to be awake with the people who were still dancing.

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)

Alan had never been stabbed or shot or punctured or broken. Were scars the best evidence of living? If we have not survived something, and thus were certain that we'd lived, we could scar ourselves, couldn't we?

But while Sasha told us that in America even the most successful men can have but one wife at once--my father had six--and talked about escalators, indoor plumbing, and the various laws of the land, he did not warn us that I would be told by American teenagers that I should go back to Africa.

You don't propose marriage after one date. You don't decide on a career after one article or class session. You don't cast your vote based on one opinion of the candidate in question. Stories, essays, novels, and memoirs all deserve to be, indeed have to be read multiple times. Every writer worth his or her salt knows that writing is rewriting. Every reader should know the same thing about understanding text: that is, real reading is rereading.

You and I read the same books and hear the same sermons and we come away with different messages. That has to be evidence of some serious problem, right?

It was as if, for a moment, she thought Mae was one kind of person, but now, knowing she was another, she could part with her, she could give her back to the world.

You better [start writing] now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your voice heard, and then let others hear your voice. And the only way any of that's going to happen is if you actually do it. People can't read the thoughts in your head. They can only read the thoughts you put down, carefully and with great love, on the page. So you have to do it, goddamnit.

Why was he alive on Earth? Very often the meaning was obscured. Very often it required some digging. The meaning of his life was an elusive stream of water hundreds of feet below the surface, and he would periodically drop a bucket down the well, fill it, bring it up and drink from it. But this did not sustain him for long.

People don't like to be kept away from what they want. Especially when it appears within their reach. It makes one doubly angry.

Revelation is everything, not for its own sake, because most self-revelation is just garbage-- oop! --yes, but we have to purge the garbage, toss it out, throw it into a bunker and burn it, because it is fuel. It's fossil fuel. And what do we do with fossil fuel? Why, we dump it into a bunker and burn it, of course. No, we don't do that. But you get my meaning. It's endlessly renewable, usable without diminishing one's capacity to create more.

The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard.

Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything.

Toph looks at me. I nod gravely. In this world, in our new world, there will be rocking. We will pay tribute to musicmakers like Journey, particularly if this is Two-for-Tuesday, which means inevitably that one of the songs will be: Just a small-town girl...

The one big surprise is that as it turns out, God is the sun. It makes sense, if you think about it. Why we didn't see it sooner I cannot say. Every day the sun was right there burning, our and other planets hovering around it, always apologizing and we didn't think it was God. Why would there be a God and also a sun? Of course God is the sun. Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know.

When I was very young I couldn't watch anything black and white on TV because I knew the people moving were now dust.

Don't you think if someone like me, someone who invented most of this shit, is scared, don't you think you should be scared, too?

The work of man is done behind the back of the natural world. When nature notices, and can muster the energy, it wipes the slate clean again.

This is why Max loved Mr. Beckmann: he was an equal. He seemed to have navigated his way through seven or so decades of adulthood without forgetting one moment of his childhood- what he loved and hated, feared and coveted.

It was always difficult to get cattle returned once a marriage was dissolved.

I know forever they will be in my house, the rooms of my mind, I know this and I have accepted this but while I know they will be there I want them dead there. I cannot have them breathing there! I want them in the floirboards of the basement of my soul.

Outside the walls of the Circle, all was noise and struggle, failure and filth. But here, all had been perfected. The best people had made the best systems and the best systems had reaped funds, unlimited funds

Our town was rigid in many ways, in terms of the uniformity of things, the colors of skin, the makes of cars, the lushness of the lawns, but on top of that it was sort of a blank canvas, so -- and again, I guess this is true of any child -- I was ready to quickly accept the sudden and total substitutions of all I knew to be true.