Quotes from Dave Eggers

This was uncalled for.

Happiness above can solve the sadness below.

Sometimes," Oisín said, "people simply do things. They get an idea and do it, and it's not tied up with any love or childhood trauma. If we believe there's a dramatic origin story for every human endeavor, we deprive our species of the ability to simply conjure an idea. To just make stuff and do things.

We've sent over 180 million frowns from the U.S alone, and you can bet that has an effect on the regime.

It was no longer exotic to have a gay presidential candidate. In fact, since the advent of the Indiana mayor—never president but now a senator—no presidential election had been without one. Though, to be sure, every gay candidate had been in a certain mold—

to prove to all and ourselves that we are real, that we like everyone else simply want our lives on tape, proven, feel that what we are doing only becomes real once it has been entered into the record.

Everyone's cavemen ancestors were assholes.

Friday's mail (the only day the post office still operated)

There were twenty-five million people in Yemen and at least thirteen million guns—after the United States, it was, per capita the world's most armed nation.

That kind of thing is stopped at the gate, just like plastic gift baskets and irony.

The effect of his appearance on the world was profound. He walked through the city not as a poor Tenderloin kid, his baggy clothes shrouding him with negative assumptions, but as Rupert, the preppy cartoon bear, who was welcome anywhere. He became someone the adults he encountered—at his high school, at the mosque, at any store he entered—trusted and wanted around.

The easiest way to witness the stupidity and misplaced hopes of all 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. Sam

But if the customer knows that five dollars is the actual price that cup of coffee should be—the correct price to ensure that everyone involved in bringing that cup of coffee into existence is being treated humanely and given a chance to live with dignity—would that customer balk or step up?

she knew he would not rest until he had done it. It was maddening. It was strange, even. But then again, she thought, it gave their marriage a certain epic scope.

Subjectivity is just objectivity waiting for data

And for a good portion of the human race, because something has not already been, that is a good reason to fear it coming to be.

She clicked on Mae's life preserver.

You inch up through predictable behavior, and by avoiding anything problematic. This is how it intersects with the Consensual Economic Order.

Who but a fringe character would try to impede the unimpeachable improvement of the world?

I'll always be working on five things at once, usually with those documents open at the same time because if I get stuck somewhere I'll jump over to something else. That's how my head has always worked.

You know, it's been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher.

So this is the space during tutoring hours. It's very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, complete devotion to the students' work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas.

We see the beauty within and cannot say no.

McSweeney's as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object.