455 Quotes by Dave Eggers

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.

She was done, gone. She had been comfortable, and comfort is the death of the soul, which is by nature searching, insistent, unsatisfied. This dissatisfaction drives the soul to leave, to get lost, to be lost, to struggle and adapt. And adaptation is growth, and growth is life. A human’s choice is either to see new things, mountains, waterfalls, deadly storms and seas and volcanoes, or to see the same man-made things endlessly reconfigured.

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.

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.

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

I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it’s beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that purpose – that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome. I am a monster.

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.

We gravitate toward comfort, Josie thought, but it must be rationed. Give us one-third comfort and two-thirds chaos – that is balance.

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