Top 250 Dave Eggers Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “You treat a kid with respect and as an adult you talk to them as if they’re smart people. But you don’t throw at them the trappings of adulthood and you know, the darker stuff.”

— Dave Eggers

102. “Why do you want to be on The Real World? -Because I want everyone to witness my youth Why? -Isn’t it gorgeous?”

— Dave Eggers

103. “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.”

— Dave Eggers

104. “It’s the usual utopian vision. This time they were saying it’ll reduce waste. If stores know what their customers want, then they don’t overproduce, don’t overship, don’t have to throw stuff away when it’s not bought. I mean, like everything else you guys are pushing, it sounds perfect, sounds progressive, but it carries with it more control, more central tracking of everything we do.”

— Dave Eggers

105. “Paper is a uniquely beautiful format, more so than the web, I think: you need to invest in the aesthetics.”

— Dave Eggers

106. “Keep the money in your hand, never in your heart.”

— Dave Eggers

107. “I grew up north of Chicago, not far from where the Schwinn bicycle plant used to be, and was conscious of the fact that these beautiful, everlasting bikes were made just down the road.”

— Dave Eggers

108. “My head was a condemned church with a ceiling of bats, but I swung from this dark mood to euphoria when I thought about leaving.”

— Dave Eggers

109. “It all meant something. Until it didn’t.”

— Dave Eggers

110. “That only having left could she and her children achieve something like sublimity, that without movement there is no struggle, and without struggle there is no purpose, and without purpose there is nothing at all. She wanted to tell every mother, every father: There is meaning in motion.”

— Dave Eggers

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

— Dave Eggers

112. “The question, from pundits and constituents, was obvious and loud: If you aren’t transparent, what are you hiding? Though some citizens and commentators objected on grounds of privacy, asserting that government, at virtually every level, had always needed to do some things in private for the sake of security and efficiency, the momentum crushed all such arguments and the progression continued. If you weren’t operating in the light of day, what were you doing in the shadows?”

— Dave Eggers

113. “And there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.”

— Dave Eggers

114. “We knew nothing; the gaps in our knowledge were random and annoying. They were potholes – they could be patched but they multiplied without pattern or remorse. And even if we knew something, had read something, were almost sure of something, we wouldn’t ever know the truth, or come anywhere close to it. The truth had to be seen. Anything else was a story, entertaining but more embroidered fib than crude, shapeless fact.”

— Dave Eggers

115. “That the volume of information, of data, of judgements, of measurements, was too much, and there were too many people, and too many desires of too many people, and too many opinions of too many people, and too much pain from too many people, and having all of it constantly collated, collected, added and aggregated, and presented to her as if that all made it tidier and more manageable – it was too much.”

— Dave Eggers

116. “Eliminate lobbyists. Eliminate polls. It might even eliminate Congress. If we can know the will of the people at any time, without filter, without misinterpretation or bastardization, wouldn’t it eliminate much of Washington?”

— Dave Eggers

117. “Also, I need deadlines, just like everybody else, especially coming from magazines, newspapers, and stuff like that. I need daily or weekly deadlines to get stuff done, or I continue to do things and not go off on a year of unproductivity.”

— Dave Eggers

118. “Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.”

— Dave Eggers

119. “Grief doesn’t arrive on schedule, as much as we’d like to.”

— Dave Eggers

120. “The inactive must justify their sloth by picking nits with those making an attempt –.”

— Dave Eggers

121. “There are times when I am concerned about Toph’s expression when I’m really singing, with vibrato and all, singing the guitar parts and everything – an expression that to the untrained eye might look like abject terror, or revulsion – but I know well enough that it is awe.”

— Dave Eggers

122. “High school teachers who want to get reluctant readers turned around need to give the students some say in the reading list. Make it collaborative: The students will feel ownership, and everyone will dig in.”

— Dave Eggers

123. “He wanted to fly in lightweight contraptions with her.”

— Dave Eggers

124. “But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs.”

— Dave Eggers

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

— Dave Eggers

126. “And how these bridgemakers exquisitely and bravely embody this nation’s reason for being, a place of radical opportunity and ceaseless welcome. And how when we forget that this is central to all that is best about this country, we forget ourselves – a blended people united not by stasis and cowardice and fear, but by irrational exuberance, by global enterprise on a human scale, by the inherent rightness of pressing forward, always forward, driven by courage unfettered and unyielding.”

— Dave Eggers

127. “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.”

— Dave Eggers

128. “Coffee could be smelled and tasted and touched. And it was a commodity, recession-proof. Next to gasoline, it might be one of the most recession-proof commodities of all.”

— Dave Eggers

129. “Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.”

— Dave Eggers

130. “The Circle had 90 percent of the search market. Eighty-eight percent of the free-mail market, 92 percent of text servicing. That was, in her perspective, a simple testament to their making and delivering the best product. It seemed insane to punish the company for its efficiency, for its attention to detail. For succeeding.”

— Dave Eggers

131. “He had had a dream, and dreams are heavy things, requiring constant care and pruning.”

— Dave Eggers

132. “No. There is no balance, and no retribution, and no rules. The rules and balances you blather about are hopeful creations of a man fearing death.”

— Dave Eggers

133. “The easiest way to witness the stupidity and misplaced hopes of 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.”

— Dave Eggers

134. “Late that night, I get back to Grant and Eric’s, and they are watching a movie where Al Pacino is blind. Al Pacino is angry and talks with an unplaceable accent. He is maybe Canadian.”

— Dave Eggers

135. “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.”

— Dave Eggers

136. “The last step was convincing the customer to pay for it. A customer accustomed to a two-dollar cup of coffee will startle at the idea of paying five dollars for a cup of direct-trade Ethiopian coffee. 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?”

— Dave Eggers

137. “Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River, in east-central Colombia, with forty-two locals we hadn’t yet met. It was a clear and eyeblue day, that day, as was the first day of this story, a few years ago in January, on Chicago’s North Side, in the opulent shadow of Wrigley and with the wind coming low and searching off the jagged half-frozen lake.”

— Dave Eggers

138. “People are strange, but more than that, they’re good. They’re good first, then strange.”

— Dave Eggers

139. “Every part of my body felt electric. My chest ached and my head throbbed with the great terrible limitless possibility of the morning, and when it came, the sky was washed white, everything was new, and I hadn’t slept at all.”

— Dave Eggers

140. “I am a freak in secondhand velour, a leper who uses L’Oreal Anti-sticky Mega Gel. I am rootless, ripped from all foundations, an orphan raising an orphan and wanting to take away everything there is and replace it with stuff I’ve made.”

— Dave Eggers

141. “But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren’t going into the ‘Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help’ or something like that. It was 826 Valencia.”

— Dave Eggers

142. “Maybe he hadn’t thought the war through. It had seemed like simple fun when he had first pictured it, with a glorious beginning, a difficult but valor-filled middle, and a victorious end. He hadn’t accounted for the fact that there might not be much of a resolution to the battle, and he hadn’t imagined what it would feel like when the war just sort of ended, without anyone admitting defeat and congratulating him for his bravery.”

— Dave Eggers

143. “You’re breaking out of character, again.”

— Dave Eggers

144. “In her life Josie had heard only one or two people apologize. Wasn’t that something? Wouldn’t that be significant to future anthropologists? This was a time in history when no one was sorry. Sorry took too much courage, too much strength and faith and rightness to have a place in this cowardly century.”

— Dave Eggers

145. “The house is a factory.”

— Dave Eggers

146. “Why do we pursue information that we know will never leave our heads?”

— Dave Eggers

147. “I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing.”

— Dave Eggers

148. “We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.”

— Dave Eggers

149. “I think there’s a future where the Web and print coexist and they each do things uniquely and complement each other, and we have what could be the ultimate and best-yet array of journalistic venues.”

— Dave Eggers

150. “If you believe there’s only one path to God, then you’re limiting God.”

— Dave Eggers