Quotes from Dave Eggers

Wars] can come in different shapes and guises, but always wars come in increments. I am convinced there are steps, and that once these events are set in motion, they are virtually impossible to reverse. There were other steps in the country's stumble toward war, and I remember these days clearly now. But again, at the time I did not recognize these days as such, not as steps but as days like any others.

God who protects my people I call upon you to send away the murahaleen. Protect me God protect my family as they run. Oh God of the sky, keep me safe tonight. Keep me hidden, keep me quiet. Oh God of rain, let me find water. Let me not die of thirst. Oh God of the soul, why are you doing this? I have done nothing to ask for this. I'm a boy. I'm a boy. Would you send this to a lamb? You have no right.

His mind seemed barely tethered to his body, much less the earth.

He did a terrible thing and eliminating him would have left the world tidier. Or so goes the logic of the last fifty years of American justice. We throw away flawed people, people who have made terrible mistakes, with regularity and great alacrity. We jail drug dealers for decades, and we execute killers. We want them away. Out of sight.

How lame this is, how small, terrible. Or maybe it is beautiful. I can't decide if what I am doing is beautiful and noble and right, or small and disgusting.

Openness is all, she thought. Truth was its own reward.

Eliminate lobbyists. Eliminate polls. It might even eliminate Congress. If we can know the will of the people at any time, without filter, without misinterpretation or bastardization, wouldn't it eliminate much of Washington?

The easiest way to witness the stupidity and misplaced hopes of humanity is to watch, for twenty minutes, a human using a leaf blower. With this machine, the man was saying, I will murder all quiet. I will destroy the aural plane. And I will do so with a machine that performs a task far less efficiently than I could with a rake.

I prefer the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it's more bare, more hollow. 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 the children sleep.

Secrets are the enablers of antisocial, immoral and destructive behavior.

We have no choice. We need the communion of souls and only here are they awake.

There's no such thing as The One, she once said. They were at dinner in Taipei, with a supplier and his wife. The couple had been married forty years. The idea that there's just one person in the world you're meant to be with, it's illogical, she said. She'd had a few drinks and was enjoying her own loud thoughts. The math just doesn't work! Who you end up with, it's really just an accident of proximity.

Her student loans were voracious and demanded monthly feedings

Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it's fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it.

Why shouldn't your curiosity about the world be rewarded?

So much human attention and expertise, in fact, that even at four dollars a cup, chances were some person—or many people, or hundreds of people—along the line were being taken, underpaid, exploited.

the gimmickry is simply a device, a defense, to obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole story, which is both too black and blinding to look at ---avert your eyes!--- but nevertheless useful, at least to the author, even in caricatured or condensed form, because telling as many people as possible about it helps, he thinks, to dilute the pain and bitterness and thus facilitate its flushing from his soul

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. If I ever love again, I will not wait to love as I can. It is no way to live, to wait to love.

I feel like a parent whose children prefer to stay inside and watch TV. The father pleads, It's a beautiful day. Why don't you go play outside? In this case, I feel like pleading, It's a completely spooky night. Forget the loud music--come outside and have a blood sacrifice or something! There's a full moon! (Jonathan Ames, Middle-American Gothic)

It seemed the whole world knew this person named Diana, and if the world knew her, the connection between the peoples of the earth was tighter than I had imagined. I wondered if the people of England would mourn if Mike and Grace died. At that time, confused as I was, I imagined that they would.

None of this I'd mine. My father is not mine- not in that way. His death and what he's done are not mine. Nor are my upbringing not my town nor its tragedies. How can these things be mine? Holding me responsible for keeping hidden this information is ridiculous. I was born into a town and a family and the town and my family happened to me. I own none of it. It's everyone's.

What can one do with one's hands when the camera is interested in other things?

That only having left could she and her children achieve something like sublimity, that without movement there is no struggle, and without struggle there is no purpose, and without purpose there is nothing at all. She wanted to tell every mother, every father: There is meaning in motion.

Did children want sports cars for parents? No. They wanted Hondas. They wanted to know that the car would start in all seasons.