Quotes from Dave Eggers

I went to public school all my life and all through college and I liked it.

It was just an idea I had, that it could be cool to have a book covered in fake fur.

I've purposely stayed away from reading much about postmodern theory, and most everything I have read just bored me to tears. I don't think anybody's written about it, or very few have, with any verve.

It was like setting up a guillotine in the public square.You don't expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it.

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let's not forget this.

Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time.

You can't ever guess at life, at pain. All pain is real, and all pain is personal. It's the most personal thing we have. It eats each of us differently.

Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know. --After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned

Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, 'The Things They Carried', has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.

But I'm thinking about 12 things at once, a hundred thousand times a day. Most people do, I would imagine.

And that's actually the brunt of what we do is, people going straight from their workplace, straight from home, straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands more students.

Every time my brain parks the car neatly in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage.

She felt some measure of relief knowing that in the very least, on the open road she would have some time to think.

Yes, a dark time passed over this land, but now there is something like light.

Three-dimensional results are important to me. I did once spend some time just writing, and floating around, and I lost my mind a little bit. I wasn't so good at that.

I went to Saudi Arabia in 2010, and spent most of my time in Jeddah and the King Abdullah Economic City.

I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I'd like to see them again. And I'd love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there.

Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.

There is travel and there are babies; everything else is drudgery and death.

It is no way to live, to wait to love.

Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the tree calligraphic.

The key thing is, even if you only have a couple of hours a month, those two hours shoulder-to-shoulder, next to one student, concentrated attention, shining this beam of light on their work, on their thoughts and their self-expression, is going to be absolutely transformative, because so many of the students have not had that ever before.

The only infallible truth of our lives is that everything we love in life will be taken from us.

When we pass by another person without telling them we love them it's cruel and wrong and we all know this.