Top 250 Dave Eggers Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 6

51. “I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I’d lose my mind.”

— Dave Eggers

52. “We see the beauty within and cannot say no.”

— Dave Eggers

53. “Nothing again. No one is listening. No one is waiting to hear the kicking of a man above. It is unexpected. You have no ears for someone like me.”

— Dave Eggers

54. “We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.”

— Dave Eggers

55. “Under the guise of having every voice heard, you create mob rule, a filterless society where secrets are crimes.”

— Dave Eggers

56. “Once a year, she remembers that she is insignificant. Then she forgets agains, because more than she is insignificant, she is forgetful.”

— Dave Eggers

57. “Having a matrix of preferences presented as your essence, as the whole you? Maybe that was it. It was some kind of mirror, but it was incomplete, distorted.”

— Dave Eggers

58. “She pulls away, pats me on the shoulder with three mini-pats, like those used to pet reptiles.”

— Dave Eggers

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

— Dave Eggers

60. “It was not knowing that was the seed of madness, loneliness, suspicion, fear.”

— Dave Eggers

61. “Don’t flatter yourself to think this is your doing. Your problem is that you think things have happened for the first time to you, and that you’re the fulcrum from which all people and the current world pivot.”

— Dave Eggers

62. “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.”

— Dave Eggers

63. “This was a new skill she’d acquired, the ability to look, to the outside world, utterly serene and even cheerful, while, in her skull, all was chaos.”

— Dave Eggers

64. “I hung up the phone, jubilant, and threw myself into a wall, then pretended to be getting electrocuted. I do this when I’m very happy.”

— Dave Eggers

65. “We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It’s almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.”

— Dave Eggers

66. “We lose weeks like buttons, like pencils.”

— Dave Eggers

67. “Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape.”

— Dave Eggers

68. “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?”

— Dave Eggers

69. “Because I grew up with this naive expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation.”

— Dave Eggers

70. “Like I don’t know the first thing about how to be simply grateful that I’m alive. Maybe that’s what’s missing in our generation. Maybe we just feel too safe, too secure. We have too much stuff and no threat of any of it disappearing anytime soon.”

— Dave Eggers

71. “A promise is like the earth underneath us. It must be solid. How can we walk, and run, and live and laugh, when we can’t count on the ground beneath us. And so it is with promises. They keep us upright. They hold up everyone and everything.”

— Dave Eggers

72. “To struggle is to strengthen my faith, my hope and my belief in humanity.”

— Dave Eggers

73. “It was a sad place, especially after a day at the Circle, where all was made with care and love and the gift of a good eye.”

— Dave Eggers

74. “Next to the photo was a frown button that said “We denounce the Central Guatemalan Security Forces.” Mae hesitated briefly, knowing the gravity of what she was about to do – to come out against these rapists and murderers – but she needed to make a stand. She pushed the button.”

— Dave Eggers

75. “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?”

— Dave Eggers

76. “Overnight, all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable. The trolls, who had more or less overtaken the internet, were driven back into the darkness.”

— Dave Eggers

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

— Dave Eggers

78. “But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.”

— Dave Eggers

79. “WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers.”

— Dave Eggers

80. “At that moment I was sure. That I belonged in my skin. That my organs were mine and my eyes were mine and my ears, which could only hear the silence of this night and my faint breathing, were mine, and I loved them and what they could do.”

— Dave Eggers

81. “His lies were so exquisite I almost wept.”

— Dave Eggers

82. “In hospitals I feel palpable comfort. I feel the competence, the expertise, so much education and money, all of the supplies sterile, everything packaged, sealed tight. My fears evaporate when the automatic doors shush open.”

— Dave Eggers

83. “I’m an amateur science enthusiast. I’m not even a professional enthusiast. I don’t know anything; I never even passed biology in high school. But I read the science section of the newspaper.”

— Dave Eggers

84. “When we pass by another person without telling them we love them it’s cruel and wrong and we all know this.”

— Dave Eggers

85. “We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.”

— Dave Eggers

86. “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.”

— Dave Eggers

87. “Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication.”

— Dave Eggers

88. “Secrets are the enablers of antisocial, immoral and destructive behavior.”

— Dave Eggers

89. “His frustration with some Americans was like that of a disappointed parent. He was so content in this country, so impressed with and loving of its opportunities, but then why, sometimes, did Americans fall short of their best selves?”

— Dave Eggers

90. “Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.”

— Dave Eggers

91. “Historically, Yemen, when not being invaded or colonized by outside powers, from the Ottomans to the British, was fighting itself.”

— Dave Eggers

92. “One might think that a boy who was out in the snow for so long would get cold, but Max was not. He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys who are part wolf and part wind do not get cold.”

— Dave Eggers

93. “The pain is not great. But the symbolism is disagreeable.”

— Dave Eggers

94. “If you think I’m annoying and preachy now, you should have known me in grade school.”

— Dave Eggers

95. “Openness is all, she thought. Truth was its own reward.”

— Dave Eggers

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

— Dave Eggers

97. “You don’t propose marriage after one date. You don’t decide on a career after one article or class session. You don’t cast your vote based on one opinion of the candidate in question. Stories, essays, novels, and memoirs all deserve to be, indeed have to be read multiple times. Every writer worth his or her salt knows that writing is rewriting. Every reader should know the same thing about understanding text: that is, real reading is rereading.”

— Dave Eggers

98. “Americans are born knowing everything and nothing. Born moving forward, quickly, or thinking they are.”

— Dave Eggers

99. “Then he got more books. He saved all the books.”

— Dave Eggers

100. “The country he had left thirty years ago had been a realistic place. There were political realities there, then and now, that precluded blind faith, that discouraged one from thinking that everything, always, would work out fairly and equitably. But he had come to believe such things in the United States. Things had worked out. Difficulties had been overcome. He had worked hard and achieved success. The machinery of government functioned.”

— Dave Eggers