455 Quotes by Dave Eggers

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.

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.

Keep the money in your hand, never in your heart.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.