Quotes from Dave Eggers

I should probably get a stone. A stone would be good. A stone would save me, would salvage all the damage we had already done, all the things we had given up or lost.

Hours later, the cat was asleep, and Erin lay next to it, her eyes half-closed. There was purring. I felt content. Why does it give so much comfort to be responsible for someone's sleep? We all — don't we? — want creatures sleeping in our homes while we walk about, turning off lights.

The elevator reads your ID, and then says hello.

If it's like us, why is it somewhere else? Deng asked. Dut

The easiest way to witness the stupidity and misplaced hopes of all humanity is to watch, for twenty minutes, a human being using a leaf blower.

In Senegal there was café touba, where the beans were mixed with selim and other spices during roasting, and sugar was added to the hot coffee—making a very sweet and aromatic drink.

Courage was the beginning, being unafraid, moving ahead, through small hardships, not turning back. Courage was simply a form of moving forward.

A good coffee should be roasted gently, in small batches, and lightly.

Running a business murders your ability to be the kind of friend people expect or deserve. Days and weeks go by and there can be no keeping up. Her best friends were her oldest friends, who did not expect constant contact. Everyone else was disappointed.

For years there was this happy time when those controlling the major internet conduits were actually decent enough people. Or at least they weren't predatory and vengeful.

Through the smal tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the trees calligraphic.

How is freedom exercised?" ... "Willfully, Irregularly. Through refutation of the custom. The breaking of patterns. Being unseen. Solitude. Social indifference. Fighting ill-wrought power. Irreverence for authority. Moving without limit or schedule through the day and the world. Choosing when to participate and when to withdraw.

That was last week's messages? Eight thousand?" "You can catch up

and sugar was added to the hot coffee

But a single contained God implied or insisted upon a hierarchy that she didn't accept. God gave way to a system of extremes, and implied choices, and choices required separations, divisions, subtle condemnations.

All this would have been fine, his many offenses, but for the fact that he actually believed that Mae cared. He believed that Mae, graduate of Carleton, dreamer of rare and golden dreams, cared about this job at the gas and electric utility. That she would be worried if Kevin considered her performance on any given day subpar. It drove her mad. The

What would it be like, she thought, to be someone like that, eloquent and inspirational, so at ease in front of thousands?

The author would also like to acknowledge the makers of comic book villains and superheroes, those who invented, or at least popularized, the notion of the normal, mild-mannered person transformed into mutant by freak accident, with the mutant thereafter driven by a strange hybrid of the most rancid bitterness and the most outrageous hope to do very, very odd and silly things, many times in the name of Good. The makers of comic books seemed to be onto something there.

I just said, 'I hope she can get by with a salary of sixty thousand dollars.' 

The needed to talk about Annie, the thoughts she was thinking. Why shouldn't they know them? The world deserved nothing less and would not wait.

When you're in your twenties in a new city where no one's from here, we're all sort of orphans. The only people that you can count on our bunch of people that you work with and that you know. You're only as good as the reliability of that latticework.

Marcus is reading a 256-page contract between the Every and a supplier of cobalt. This has been read by a number of company attorneys and outside consultants, but the attorneys miss a lot. Given the proliferation of auto-fill and AI in the legal profession, lawyers no longer know how to write. Some ninety percent of contract boilerplate is now generated by algos and AI, with only minor human intervention or augmentation. This can lead to ghastly problems.

The feeling that your daughter is a deviant already and will only get worse. In a flash, you can see her as a feral adolescent, as a dirty-bomb teenager, a burst of invisible and spreading fury. Where is she now? She's fled, not to her room but somewhere else, a closet, she always hides somewhere disturbing, a place befitting a German fairy tale. Believe

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