455 Quotes by Dave Eggers

At this point there were good days, good weeks, when we pretended that it was acceptable that Jack had lived at all, that his life had been, in its truncated way, complete. This wasn’t one of those days.

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

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?

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.