Top 250 Dave Eggers Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Morning comes like a scream through a pinhole.”

— Dave Eggers

202. “They clearly see through the whole thing, that we are using this to get exposure, to prove to all and ourselves that we are real, that we like everyone else simply want our lives on tape, proven, feel that what we are doing only becomes real once is has been entered into the record.”

— Dave Eggers

203. “But while mum and dad were incredibly caring, it was also a very chaotic household where everyone fought about everything. So I know what it’s like to internalize all that chaos.”

— Dave Eggers

204. “I’m interested in the human impact of the giant foot of misplaced government. After all, we encounter it every day.”

— Dave Eggers

205. “I always like the idea of doing interviews with somebody but completely seriously not ever mentioning what that person is generally known for.”

— Dave Eggers

206. “None of this I’d mine. My father is not mine- not in that way. His death and what he’s done are not mine. Nor are my upbringing not my town nor its tragedies. How can these things be mine? Holding me responsible for keeping hidden this information is ridiculous. I was born into a town and a family and the town and my family happened to me. I own none of it. It’s everyone’s.”

— Dave Eggers

207. “Their howls rose to the sky and twisted together until they were on, and the other beasts joined in too, all of their voices creating a wild, plaintive song of sorry and abandon and anger and love.”

— Dave Eggers

208. “The key thing is managed awareness of your role in the world and history. 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.”

— Dave Eggers

209. “It was just an idea I had, that it could be cool to have a book covered in fake fur.”

— Dave Eggers

210. “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.”

— Dave Eggers

211. “I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness.”

— Dave Eggers

212. “You know, it’s been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher.”

— Dave Eggers

213. “And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students.”

— Dave Eggers

214. “I had grown up as a fan of Studs Terkel. In Chicago he sort of looms large and is mentioned often.”

— Dave Eggers

215. “Animals howl, he had been told, to declare their existence.”

— Dave Eggers

216. “Hand and I needed pants, pants to end all pants – warm and cool, breathing and trapping in, full of pockets.”

— Dave Eggers

217. “Loneliness is just a thing that I’m not personally interested in. So far, it hasn’t been on my docket of things to write about.”

— Dave Eggers

218. “A combination of acting, lying, begging, and cheating.”

— Dave Eggers

219. “You might not be able to operate your own Learjet and have an unlimited expense account, but if you have a reasonable expectation for a print-based product, whether it’s a newspaper or a magazine, you can certainly exist.”

— Dave Eggers

220. “When I was on the bestseller list with the first book, everyone who knows me knows that every week it continued to be on the list was a very dark week for me. Everyone knows that all I wanted was to be off that list.”

— Dave Eggers

221. “Our town was rigid in many ways, in terms of the uniformity of things, the colors of skin, the makes of cars, the lushness of the lawns, but on top of that it was sort of a blank canvas, so – and again, I guess this is true of any child – I was ready to quickly accept the sudden and total substitutions of all I knew to be true.”

— Dave Eggers

222. “We both see strangers and react. We don’t like to walk by people without nodding. We’re broken when people are rude. Were broken when people can’t meet us halfway. We can’t accept the limits of normal human relations-chilly, clothed, circumscribed. Our hearts pull against their leashes.”

— Dave Eggers

223. “The only explanation was that she was receiving instructions from extraplanetary overlords.”

— Dave Eggers

224. “Own the error and correct it,” he said. Hamood had a thousand proverbs and maxims. His favorite was Keep the money in your hand, never in your heart. He used that one a lot.”

— Dave Eggers

225. “She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite.”

— Dave Eggers

226. “I’ve purposely stayed away from reading much about postmodern theory, and most everything I have read just bored me to tears. I don’t think anybody’s written about it, or very few have, with any verve.”

— Dave Eggers

227. “The heat was alive, predatory.”

— Dave Eggers

228. “But I’m thinking about 12 things at once, a hundred thousand times a day. Most people do, I would imagine.”

— Dave Eggers

229. “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.”

— Dave Eggers

230. “I will reach upward. I will attempt to do better. I will not be a burden upon those who have helped me too much already. I will always be grateful for what pleasures I have enjoyed, what joys I have yet to experience. I will take opportunities as they come, but at the same time, I will not trust so easily. I will look at who is at the door before opening it. I will try to be fierce. I will argue when necessary. I will be willing to fight.”

— Dave Eggers

231. “The only thing that everyone needs to look out for is keeping the students reading through high school and thereafter.”

— Dave Eggers

232. “They downloaded another customer query, and Mae scrolled through the boilerplates, found the appropriate answer, personalized it, and sent it back.”

— Dave Eggers

233. “I often cannot believe the things I do.”

— Dave Eggers

234. “When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes.”

— Dave Eggers

235. “Too often they tell me to answer my doubts with prayer, which seems very much like addressing one’s hunger by thinking of food.”

— Dave Eggers

236. “He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys whoa re part wolf and part wind do not get cold.”

— Dave Eggers

237. “Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know- they’d trade it all to know they’ve been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.”

— Dave Eggers

238. “Four had never met this man, and did not think himself capable of prophecy, but in a instant he knew Nine was an agent of chaos and would make the difficult work ahead far more so.”

— Dave Eggers

239. “Dan nodded emphatically, as if his mouth had just uttered, independently, something that his ears found quite profound.”

— Dave Eggers

240. “The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excuse the use of that second word, because I realize it’s presumptuous. Also, excuse the first word, and the term in general.”

— Dave Eggers

241. “I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.”

— Dave Eggers

242. “It’s so easy to print in the Midwest. You’re saving months in shipping and customs, so we have started printing a number of books there.”

— Dave Eggers

243. “But it felt good to cry, to let her shoulders shake, to feel the hot tears on her face, to taste their baby salt, to wipe snot all over the underside of her shirt.”

— Dave Eggers

244. “There was a rumor that Project 9 engineers had figured out a way to replace the random jumble of our nighttime dreaming with organized thinking and real-life problem solving.”

— Dave Eggers

245. “That is when the commitment to change would be put to the test: when the cameras are gone and the reporters are gone and the glamour disappears and the tedium sets in – the crushing tedium. That is when you realize, in your solitary moments, how much of your life you will have to sacrifice to change the world.”

— Dave Eggers

246. “He remained, weeks after awakening, in that period of early-morning consciousness that allows easy re-entry to dreaming. His limbs still tingled with the residue of sleep, and most days he wanted badly to allow it to overtake him again.”

— Dave Eggers

247. “My voice and movements are restricted by the things I own.”

— Dave Eggers

248. “Goddamn sometimes I only want this feeling to stay and last.”

— Dave Eggers

249. “Courage was the beginning, being unafraid, moving ahead, through small hardships, not turning back. Courage was simply a form of moving forward.”

— Dave Eggers

250. “That must drive you insa – Oh please. What would a brain do if not these sorts of exercises? I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I’d lose my mind.”

— Dave Eggers