Dave Eggers quotes:

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  • Well, my background is journalism. I don't have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.

  • The key thing is, even if you only have a couple of hours a month, those two hours shoulder-to-shoulder, next to one student, concentrated attention, shining this beam of light on their work, on their thoughts and their self-expression, is going to be absolutely transformative, because so many of the students have not had that ever before.

  • I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I'd like to see them again. And I'd love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there.

  • I'm an amateur science enthusiast. I'm not even a professional enthusiast. I don't know anything; I never even passed biology in high school. But I read the science section of the newspaper.

  • You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time.

  • I worked at Salon.com way back when they started, and there's just unmeasurable value to distributing words online, too, but I still get my news from the newspaper in the morning.

  • I think newspapers shouldn't try to compete directly with the Web, and should do what they can do better, which may be long-form journalism and using photos and art, and making connections with large-form graphics and really enhancing the tactile experience of paper.

  • 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.

  • But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren't going into the 'Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help' or something like that. It was 826 Valencia.

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • Did children want sports cars for parents? No. They wanted Hondas. They wanted to know that the car would start in all seasons.

  • The idea of 'Voice of Witness' is to let survivors and witnesses of human-rights abuses tell their story at length. It started with a course that I co-taught at U.C. Berkeley journalism school back in 2003.

  • High school teachers who want to get reluctant readers turned around need to give the students some say in the reading list. Make it collaborative: The students will feel ownership, and everyone will dig in.

  • I don't mean to beat a made-in-America drum, but I would be lying if I said it doesn't feel somehow right to be printing books in the U.S.

  • I really believe strongly that kids should be spared the runoff of their parents' lives and problems.

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

  • I went to public school all my life and all through college and I liked it.

  • 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.

  • But you know, there's something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention - they go home, they're finished. They don't stall, they don't do their homework in front of the TV.

  • 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.

  • Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.

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

  • 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.

  • To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise.

  • It is very much, she thinks, like looking at the moon and knowing one could make it there, too. It is only time and breath that stand between her and the top. She is young. She'll do it and have done it.

  • This war has made racists of too many of the and too many of us, and it is the leadership in Khartoum that has stoked this fire, that has brought to the surface, and in some cases created from whole cloth, new hatreds that have bred unprecedented acts of brutality.

  • The raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can't cut corners.

  • 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.

  • I've always been interested in the form itself, so I always feel like I've never been good at going ahead with the artifice and not acknowledging the self in the artistic process, and not acknowledging the absurdity of pretending that's required in fiction.

  • We see the beauty within and cannot say no.

  • No. There is no balance, and no retribution, and no rules. The rules and balances you blather about are hopeful creations of a man fearing death.

  • I'm never a fan of the sociopathic kind of reviewing, people who are sort of self-immolating and have social problems or whatever, and let it out in literary-criticism form. I just feel like book reviewing should be respectful and calm and not filled with bile.

  • 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

  • Nonfiction narratives are really powerful and valid in themselves. But one thing that you don't get sometimes from the more clinical or academic books or nonfiction books is that you don't get to hear the person's voice; you don't get them as individuals. You get a few quotes and you hear them as sort of a case study: numbers, examples, anecdotes, maybe a paragraph here, and that's about it.

  • But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.

  • There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in coastal Louisiana

  • I think there's a future where the Web and print coexist and they each do things uniquely and complement each other, and we have what could be the ultimate and best-yet array of journalistic venues.

  • 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

  • Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the tree calligraphic.

  • Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year.

  • But what I really want is to just swim around in a warm baby pool of these friends, jump in their dry leaf pile-to rub them all over myself, without words and clothes.

  • The house is a factory.

  • We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.

  • If you don't want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You're taking up space, air.

  • It's not that our family has no taste, it's just that our family's taste is inconsistent.

  • I see colors like you hear jet planes.

  • 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.

  • I went to Saudi Arabia in 2010, and spent most of my time in Jeddah and the King Abdullah Economic City.

  • Every part of my body felt electric. My chest ached and my head throbbed with the great terrible limitless possibility of the morning, and when it came, the sky was washed white, everything was new, and I hadn't slept at all.

  • For years I feared the opening of every elevator, half-convinced that from the opened doors would come a bullet, for me, shot by a man in a tan trenchcoat. I have no idea why I feared this, expected it to happen. I even knew how I would react to this bullet coming from the elevator door, what word I would say. That word was: Finally.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Director of Ensuring the Future

  • You treat a kid with respect and as an adult you talk to them as if they're smart people. But you don't throw at them the trappings of adulthood and you know, the darker stuff.

  • This was a new skill she'd acquired, the ability to look, to the outside world, utterly serene and even cheerful, while, in her skull, all was chaos.

  • It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar time, when we're losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn. But it doesn't have to be that way.

  • 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.

  • Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.

  • Who were these people, all of them young couples, a few fabulous ones, tall thin-haired blondes with toned men in perfectly pressed jeans -- neither fearing the loss of the other.

  • He must trust, and he must have faith. And so he builds, because what is building, and rebuilding and rebuilding again, but an act of faith?

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

  • But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

  • Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know.--After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned

  • I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.

  • Still though, I think if you're not self-obsessed, you're probably boring.

  • We are the bright new stars born of a screaming black hole, the nascent suns burst from the darkness, from the grasping void of space that folds and swallows--a darkness that would devour anyone not as strong as we. We are oddities, sideshows, talk show subjects. We capture everyone's imagination.

  • To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise. The web model is just so much more complicated, and involves this third party of advertisers, and all these other sources of revenue that are sort of provisional, but haven't been proven yet.

  • We are unusual and tragic and alive.

  • 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.

  • I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl's 'James and the Giant Peach'.

  • 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.

  • I am a bike enthusiast; there's a certain amount of romance to bikes. They're both beautiful and utilitarian.

  • 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.

  • So this is the space during tutoring hours. It's very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, complete devotion to the students' work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas.

  • 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.

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

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

  • Because I grew up with this naive expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation.

  • Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, 'The Things They Carried', has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.

  • Also, I need deadlines, just like everybody else, especially coming from magazines, newspapers, and stuff like that. I need daily or weekly deadlines to get stuff done, or I continue to do things and not go off on a year of unproductivity.

  • There are many Saudi women doctors, and there are many wealthy and powerful and well-educated Saudi women who circumvent the restrictions put upon them, quietly or otherwise.

  • They took my mother's stomach out six months ago.

  • I'll always be working on five things at once, usually with those documents open at the same time because if I get stuck somewhere I'll jump over to something else. That's how my head has always worked.

  • The weird thing is that working within an established story was actually kind of liberating. You know the beginning and middle and end, more or less, so there's less pressure to figure all that out.

  • We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.

  • You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back.

  • Again the greatest use of a human was to be useful. Not to consume, not to watch, but to do something for someone else that improved their life, even for a few minutes.

  • Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It's just not my thing anymore.

  • I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing.

  • Morning comes like a scream through a pinhole.

  • I always had a hard time with fiction. It does feel like driving a car in a clown suit. You're going somewhere, but you're in costume, and you're not really fooling anybody. You're the guy in costume, and everybody's supposed to forget that and go along with you. Obviously, it can work, it works all the time - well, it doesn't always work. Still, no matter what, I'm always looking at the form and addressing it, not ignoring it.

  • Why do you want to be on The Real World? -Because I want everyone to witness my youth Why? -Isn't it gorgeous?

  • I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I'd lose my mind.

  • 3. There are bears and there are small dogs. Be strong like bear! If they take out your teeth, sit on the dogs. Bears always forget they can just sit on the dogs. Sit on the dogs.

  • Maybe he hadn't thought the war through. It had seemed like simple fun when he had first pictured it, with a glorious beginning, a difficult but valor-filled middle, and a victorious end. He hadn't accounted for the fact that there might not be much of a resolution to the battle, and he hadn't imagined what it would feel like when the war just sort of ended, without anyone admitting defeat and congratulating him for his bravery.

  • 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.

  • Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot.

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

  • 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.

  • I had the sensation that I might always be running like this, that I would always have to run, and that I would always be able to run.

  • It is no way to live, to wait to love.

  • All I ever wanted was to know what to do.

  • The only infallible truth of our lives is that everything we love in life will be taken from us.

  • Be strong, be brave, be true. Endure.

  • We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our past and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself.

  • 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.

  • I hung up the phone, jubilant, and threw myself into a wall, then pretended to be getting electrocuted. I do this when I'm very happy.

  • At that moment I was sure. That I belonged in my skin. That my organs were mine and my eyes were mine and my ears, which could only hear the silence of this night and my faint breathing, were mine, and I loved them and what they could do.

  • And there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.

  • If your hand doesn't work for it, your heart doesn't feel sorry for it.

  • Every time a crime was committed by a Muslim, that person's faith was mentioned, regardless of its relevance. When a crime is committed by a Christian, do they mention his religion? ... When a crime is committed by a black man, it's mentioned in the first breath: 'An African American man was arrested today...' But what about German Americans? Anglo Americans? A white man robs a convenience store and do we hear he's of Scottish descent? In no other instance is the ancestry mentioned.

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