Quotes from Dave Eggers

I had the sensation that I might always be running like this, that I would always have to run, and that I would always be able to run.

Again the greatest use of a human was to be useful. Not to consume, not to watch, but to do something for someone else that improved their life, even for a few minutes.

And worse, you're not doing anything interesting anymore. 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. Have you?

What is building, and rebuilding and rebuilding again, but an act of faith?

But what I really want is to just swim around in a warm baby pool of these friends, jump in their dry leaf pile-to rub them all over myself, without words and clothes.

Why do we pursue information that we know will never leave our heads?

You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it [dignity]. It's never dignified, always brutal. What's dignified about dying? It's never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. 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.

It occurred to her, in a moment of sudden clarity, that what had always caused her anxiety, or stress, or worry, was not any one force, nothing independent and external- it wasn't danger to herself or the constant calamity of other people and their problems. It was internal: it was subjective: it was not knowing.

So I should be aware of the dangers of self-consciousness, but at the same time, I'll be plowing through the fog of all these echoes, plowing through mixed metaphors, noise, and will try to show the core, which is still there, as a core, and is valid, despite the fog. The core is the core is the core. There is always the core, that can't be articulated. Only caricatured.

Your life has been lived a hundred times. A thousand times. It's not all that great, really. Don't take it so seriously. Don't handle it so delicately.

But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it's here that we need to be.

Morning comes like a scream through a pinhole.

Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That's the best you can do.

He wanted to fly in lightweight contraptions with her.

They were so in love with the world, and so disappointed in every aspect of it.

my problem with paper is that all communication dies with it. It holds no possibility of continuity.

We've become a nation of indoor cats, he'd said. A nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers. Thank God these weren't the kind of Americans who settled this country. They were a different breed! They crossed the country in wagons with wooden wheels! People croaked along the way, and they barely stopped. Back then, you buried your dead and kept moving.

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

This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.

I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I'd known. But I tried anyway.

We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day?

The raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can't cut corners.

Maybe he was more than the sum of his broken parts.

If things continue this way, there will be two societies - or at least I hope there will be two - the one you're helping create, and an alternative to it. You and your ilk will live, willingly, joyfully, under constant surveillance, watching each other always, commenting on each other, voting and liking and disliking each other, smiling and frowning, and otherwise doing nothing much else.