Top 250 Dave Eggers Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “When there is pleasure, there is often abandon, and mistakes are made.”

— Dave Eggers

152. “But of course there’s no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It’s the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons.”

— Dave Eggers

153. “You wouldn’t believe what people will believe once they know our story. They’re ready for anything, basically – will believe anything, because they’ve been thrown off-balance, are still wondering if any of this is true, our story in general, but aren’t sure and are terrified of offending us.”

— Dave Eggers

154. “You still know that boy. He was very angry at fourteen, fifteen, in summer and winter, at home or in the world. So angry that his face contorted in photos. The camera was a question and his face did not know the answer.”

— Dave Eggers

155. “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.”

— Dave Eggers

156. “McSweeney’s as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object.”

— Dave Eggers

157. “The air is like being wanted, we say, and they nod approvingly. The air is like getting older, they say, and they touch our arms gently.”

— Dave Eggers

158. “I am a bike enthusiast; there’s a certain amount of romance to bikes. They’re both beautiful and utilitarian.”

— Dave Eggers

159. “How many times in life can we make decisions that are important but will not hurt anyone? Are we obligated- maybe we are- to say yes to any choice when no one will be hurt? We use the word hurt when talking about things like this because when these things go wrong it can feel as if you were hit in the sternum by a huge animal that’s run for miles just to strike you.”

— Dave Eggers

160. “The author would also like to acknowledge makers of comic book villains and superheroes, those who invented, or at least popularized, the notion of the normal, mild-mannered person transformed into a mutant by freak accident.”

— Dave Eggers

161. “This boy thinks I am not of his species, that I am some other kind of creature, one that can be crushed under the weight of a phone book. The pain is not great, but the symbolism is disagreeable.”

— Dave Eggers

162. “So much human attention and expertise, in fact, that even at four dollars a cup, chances were some person – or many people, or hundreds of people – along the line were being taken, underpaid, exploited.”

— Dave Eggers

163. “Somehow she had to trust that they would use their bullets on targets, not on her family, that nonsensical trust seeming to be the core of life in America.”

— Dave Eggers

164. “He was feeling buoyant, flexible. He wanted to go jogging. He stood. He couldn’t go jogging. He called room service and ordered a basket of breads and pastries.”

— Dave Eggers

165. “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.”

— Dave Eggers

166. “How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.”

— Dave Eggers

167. “I didn’t care anymore what my ancestors would think. We were the Red Army and needed to eat.”

— Dave Eggers

168. “There were twenty-five million people in Yemen and at least thirteen million guns – after the United States, it was, per capita the world’s most armed nation. Men wore AKs walking down the sreet. They brought them to weddings.”

— Dave Eggers

169. “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.”

— Dave Eggers

170. “We were fools and now we were driving to our deaths in a rental car. Janet Jackson was tinkling from the speakers, asking what we had done for her as of late.”

— Dave Eggers

171. “PRIVACY IS THEFT.”

— Dave Eggers

172. “His mind seemed barely tethered to his body, much less the earth.”

— Dave Eggers

173. “At Loch Mor we walked down a spongy hill to a valley. The sun was dropping then dropped, leaving a sky of frilly reds. The moon appeared too soon. The valley sloped around a teardrop-shaped lake, pink with the bizarre fuchsia bursts of the late-coming sunset. Violet heather bruised the green weedy ground as we jumped down. This was a place conceived in a burst of emotion by a melancholy boy.”

— Dave Eggers

174. “Why did we do that to Pluto? We had it good with Pluto.”

— Dave Eggers

175. “I publish my own books, so there isn’t a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.”

— Dave Eggers

176. “Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything.”

— Dave Eggers

177. “Now create in your mind the best of days, and memorize these details, place this day center in your mind, and when you are the most frightened, bring forth this day and place yourself within it.”

— Dave Eggers

178. “If a boy became sick he walked alone; the others were afraid to catch what he had, and did not want to know him too well for he would surely die soon. We did not want his voice in our heads.”

— Dave Eggers

179. “You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me.”

— Dave Eggers

180. “I think I’m far too hopeful and trusting. That’s something I got from my mum.”

— Dave Eggers

181. “He’s turned inside out, and is with the Sudanese to find out how to become right again.”

— Dave Eggers

182. “So yeah, we put llamas everywhere. That was us. We just liked looking at them, so we bred about six million and spread them around.”

— Dave Eggers

183. “I was feeling everything too much. Everything pulled at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools.”

— Dave Eggers

184. “There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in coastal Louisiana.”

— Dave Eggers

185. “It’s not that our family has no taste, it’s just that our family’s taste is inconsistent.”

— Dave Eggers

186. “Some days he climbed over the foothills of indifference to see the landscape of his life and future for what it was: mappable, traversable, achievable.”

— Dave Eggers

187. “We have no choice. We need the communion of souls and only here are they awake.”

— Dave Eggers

188. “They started a great fire in the middle of the market, and from this fire they took burning logs and torches, and these they threw onto the roofs of most of the homes within a one-mile radius. The few men who resisted were shot. This was effectively the end of any kind of life in Marial Bai for some time. Again, the rebels for whom this was retribution were nowhere to be found.”

— Dave Eggers

189. “It was as if, for a moment, she thought Mae was one kind of person, but now, knowing she was another, she could part with her, she could give her back to the world.”

— Dave Eggers

190. “To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that’s begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way.”

— Dave Eggers

191. “He did a terrible thing and eliminating him would have left the world tidier. Or so goes the logic of the last fifty years of American justice. We throw away flawed people, people who have made terrible mistakes, with regularity and great alacrity. We jail drug dealers for decades, and we execute killers. We want them away. Out of sight.”

— Dave Eggers

192. “My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it’s operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance – this is why people tell me secrets – my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is ever lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound.”

— Dave Eggers

193. “Mokhtar and his friends would be working a hustle when one of them would look up. Isn’t that your pops, Mokhtar? His father circled his childhood as he circled the city – a kind of sixty-foot roaming conscience.”

— Dave Eggers

194. “Always we learn things and then we forget them.”

— Dave Eggers

195. “The money that could have saved the Shuttle, and the money we send to random countries, that we use to remake unchangeable countries ten thousand miles away.”

— Dave Eggers

196. “This was Josie’s preferred method of parenting: go someplace like this, with grand scale and much to be discovered, and watch your children wander and injure themselves but not significantly. Sit and do nothing. When they come back to show you something, some rock or mop of seaweed, inspect it and ask questions about it. Socrates invented the ideal method for the parent who likes to sit and do very little.”

— Dave Eggers

197. “This book is a form of struggle, and it keeps my spirit alive to struggle.”

— Dave Eggers

198. “Hello Frances, I have just been to health class, and I was wondering how your feminine parts were developing.”

— Dave Eggers

199. “Mae, so many of the things I invented I honestly did for fun, out of some perverse game of whether or not they’d work, whether people would use them. I mean, 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.”

— Dave Eggers

200. “But when friends would ask Kathy whether they, too, should start their own business, she talked them out of it. You don’t run the business, she would say. The business runs you.”

— Dave Eggers