Quotes from Dave Eggers

And the only thing worse than the silencing of a martyr, a real martyr – someone with dangerous ideas – is silencing someone who has nothing at all to say.

Four had never met this man, and did not think himself capable of prophecy, but in a instant he knew Nine was an agent of chaos and would make the difficult work ahead far more so.

We live in a vengeful time. You didn't get the orange chicken you ordered or the sticky rice? And now you're already home? Meaning you'd have to drive all the way back to get the orange chicken and sticky rice you ordered? Injustice! And thus avenge. Avenge the proprietor's crimes! This [is] our contemporary version of balance, of speaking truth to power. Avenge the proprietor on thy customer-review site! Right the imbalance!

This is the peculiar problem of constant connectivity: any silence of more than a few hours provokes apocalyptic thoughts.

Grief doesn't arrive on schedule, as much as we'd like to.

There would be a time when the world created people stronger than them. When all of this got worked out. But until then there would be women and men like Hanne and Alan, who were imperfect and had no path toward perfection.

Coming out was so difficult until millions of other men and women came out. Then it got a lot easier

Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication.

Animals howl, he had been told, to declare their existence.

she'd never thought of him while in the tub or flat on her bed- but in his presence she didn't want to talk or eat, she wanted to be nude with him, under a dirty sheet in a borrowed house. She wanted to hold his shoulders; she wanted to go snowshoeing with him; she wanted to go to funerals with him; she wanted him to be the father of her children

Likewise, everyone at the Circle there had been chosen, and thus the gene pool was extraordinary, the brainpower phenomenal. It was a place where everyone endeavored, constantly and passionately, to improve themselves, each other, share their knowledge, disseminate it to the world.

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

You're not seeing anything, saying anything. The weird paradox is that you think you're at the center of things, and that makes your opinions more valuable, but you yourself are becoming less vibrant. I bet you haven't done anything offscreen in months.

Knowledge is a basic human right. Equal access to all possible human experiences is a basic human right.

Many of the members of the class had never held ice.

I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it's beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that purpose—that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome. I am a monster.

the waterfall, and the tiki torches, all of these things the stuff of vacations and dreams and impossible to maintain, but then she knew—and this is what was keeping her up, her head careening with something like a toddler's joy—that she would be going back to that place, the place where all these things happened. She was welcome there, employed there.

You know what I think? I think everyone should be able, just once, to make an inanimate object come to life and be his pal. Like an orange. Or a hammer.

So this is how they lived. For some time Theo, like a tree living in the shadow of taller trees, found a way to live off reflected light.

Well now you're contradicting yourself. With balance there cannot be chaos. With randomness there can be no punishment. You're pleading for punishment in hopes that you'll see your God. Without punishment there is no God. If there is balance then there is your Lord. If balance then afterlife.

Who else but utopians could make utopia?

Americans are born knowing everything and nothing. Born moving forward, quickly, or thinking they are.

The men who are dropped in a jungle or a desert and expected video games and got mundanity and depravity and friends dying like animals.

At Loch Mor we walked down a spongy hill to a valley. The sun was dropping then dropped, leaving a sky of frilly reds. The moon appeared too soon. The valley sloped around a teardrop-shaped lake, pink with the bizarre fuchsia bursts of the late-coming sunset. Violet heather bruised the green weedy ground as we jumped down. This was a place conceived in a burst of emotion by a melancholy boy.