Top 250 Dave Eggers Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Be strong, be brave, be true. Endure.”

— Dave Eggers

Featured in: Strong Quotes

2. “I’m better than you think. I’m even better than I think I am.”

— Dave Eggers

3. “Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane.”

— Dave Eggers

4. “Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?”

— Dave Eggers

5. “Write your goddamned book now. The world awaits.”

— Dave Eggers

6. “It is no way to live, to wait to love.”

— Dave Eggers

7. “He must trust, and he must have faith. And so he builds, because what is building, and rebuilding and rebuilding again, but an act of faith?”

— Dave Eggers

8. “Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.”

— Dave Eggers

9. “Still though, I think if you’re not self-obsessed, you’re probably boring.”

— Dave Eggers

10. “We are unusual and tragic and alive.”

— Dave Eggers

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

— Dave Eggers

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

— Dave Eggers

13. “I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.”

— Dave Eggers

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

— Dave Eggers

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

— Dave Eggers

16. “You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.”

— Dave Eggers

17. “We are the bright new stars born of a screaming black hole, the nascent suns burst from the darkness, from the grasping void of space that folds and swallows – a darkness that would devour anyone not as strong as we. We are oddities, sideshows, talk show subjects. We capture everyone’s imagination.”

— Dave Eggers

18. “Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot.”

— Dave Eggers

19. “Here is a drawing of a stapler:.”

— Dave Eggers

20. “What is building, and rebuilding and rebuilding again, but an act of faith?”

— Dave Eggers

21. “You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back.”

— Dave Eggers

22. “Education about Yemen will come through customers’ engagement with the product. And in the meantime you’ll employ actual Yemeni people. And you’ll do something tangible. And you’ll make a living. And you won’t have to ask for donations. And it won’t have to be about Islam. You’re not selling Islamic coffee beans. Sell Yemeni beans. Do that, and do it well, and the rest will follow.”

— Dave Eggers

23. “She was done, gone. She had been comfortable, and comfort is the death of the soul, which is by nature searching, insistent, unsatisfied. This dissatisfaction drives the soul to leave, to get lost, to be lost, to struggle and adapt. And adaptation is growth, and growth is life. A human’s choice is either to see new things, mountains, waterfalls, deadly storms and seas and volcanoes, or to see the same man-made things endlessly reconfigured.”

— Dave Eggers

24. “When I’m doing work online or on the computer, it’s one thing. When I want to read, I want to go elsewhere, and I want to be away from the screen.”

— Dave Eggers

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

— Dave Eggers

26. “I’ve never had WiFi at home. I’m too easily distracted, and YouTube is too tempting.”

— Dave Eggers

27. “Well, my background is journalism. I don’t have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.”

— Dave Eggers

28. “Why shouldn’t your curiosity about the world be rewarded?”

— Dave Eggers

29. “There are many Saudi women doctors, and there are many wealthy and powerful and well-educated Saudi women who circumvent the restrictions put upon them, quietly or otherwise.”

— Dave Eggers

30. “What had been intriguing on Monday and Tuesday was approaching annoying by Wednesday and exasperating by Thursday.”

— Dave Eggers

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

— Dave Eggers

32. “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.”

— Dave Eggers

33. “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.”

— Dave Eggers

34. “3. There are bears and there are small dogs. Be strong like bear! If they take out your teeth, sit on the dogs. Bears always forget they can just sit on the dogs. Sit on the dogs.”

— Dave Eggers

Featured in: Strong Quotes

35. “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.”

— Dave Eggers

36. “If your hand doesn’t work for it, your heart doesn’t feel sorry for it.”

— Dave Eggers

37. “All I ever wanted was to know what to do.”

— Dave Eggers

38. “Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It’s just not my thing anymore.”

— Dave Eggers

39. “If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.”

— Dave Eggers

40. “I see colors like you hear jet planes.”

— Dave Eggers

41. “The raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can’t cut corners.”

— Dave Eggers

42. “But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.”

— Dave Eggers

43. “Money is ephemeral, moving from person to person, it’s a tool. Don’t let it get into your heart or soul.”

— Dave Eggers

44. “So many people who wanted no part of all this. That’s what’s new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that’s over. Completion is the end. We’re closing the circle around everyone – it’s a totalitarian nightmare.”

— Dave Eggers

45. “If you don’t want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You’re taking up space, air.”

— Dave Eggers

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

— Dave Eggers

47. “A circle is the strongest shape in the universe. Nothing can beat it, nothing can improve upon it, nothing can be more perfect.”

— Dave Eggers

48. “Who else but utopians could make utopia?”

— Dave Eggers

49. “As we all know here at the Circle, transparency leads to peace of mind. No longer.”

— Dave Eggers

50. “You sit at a desk twelve hours a day and you have nothing to show for it except some numbers that won’t exist or be remembered in a week. You’re leaving no evidence you lived. There’s no proof.”

— Dave Eggers