Dave Eggers
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.Collection: Christian
We lose weeks like buttons, like pencils.Collection: Buttons
Morning comes like a scream through a pinhole.Collection: Morning
I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it's hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so – this has always been my dream – so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while children sleep.Collection: Life
My parents told me they were going to kill me at least a thousand times growing up. "I'm gonna kill you," and then they'd whack me on the side of the head or whatever. And "What's wrong with you?" And "I'm gonna lock you up," and "I'm gonna throw you out the window," and "I'm gonna kill you." You know, all these things that you say in the heat of a normal chaotic household.Collection: Growing Up
All I ever wanted was to know what to do.Collection: Wanted
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.Collection: Baby
GOD: I own you like I own the caves. THE OCEAN: Not a chance. No comparison. GOD: I made you. I could tame you. THE OCEAN: At one time, maybe. But not now. GOD: I will come to you, freeze you, break you. THE OCEAN: I will spread myself like wings. I am a billion tiny feathers. You have no idea what's happened to me.Collection: Ocean
We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.Collection: Feeding
It is no way to live, to wait to love.Collection: Waiting
I see colors like you hear jet planes.Collection: Color
When we pass by another person without telling them we love them it’s cruel and wrong and we all know this.Collection: Persons
Love is implicit in every connection. It should be. Thus when absent it makes us insane. (You Shall Know Our Velocity)Collection: Love Is
I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing.Collection: Self
I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I'd lose my mind.Collection: Ideas
Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.Collection: Pain
There is travel and there are babies; everything else is drudgery and death.Collection: Baby
Yes, a dark time passed over this land, but now there is something like light.Collection: Dark
Once a year, she remembers that she is insignificant. Then she forgets agains, because more than she is insignificant, she is forgetful.Collection: Years
No one’s forcing you to do this. You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You’re at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you’re staring at a screen, searching for strangers in Dubai.Collection: Communication
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.Collection: Loss
I often cannot believe the things I do.Collection: Believe
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 crayonsCollection: Children
I'm better than you think. I'm even better than I think I am.Collection: Thinking
Be strong, be brave, be true. Endure.Collection: Strong
When you're in your twenties in a new city where no one's from here, we're all sort of orphans. The only people that you can count on our bunch of people that you work with and that you know. You're only as good as the reliability of that latticework.Collection: Cities
There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in coastal LouisianaCollection: Home
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?Collection: Have Faith
If you don't want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You're taking up space, air.Collection: Air
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.Collection: Feelings
Why shouldn’t your curiosity about the world be rewarded?Collection: Curiosity
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.Collection: Dream
His lies were so exquisite I almost wept.Collection: Lying
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 DrownedCollection: Thinking
Hello Frances, I have just been to health class, and I was wondering how your feminine parts were developing.Collection: Class
You're breaking out of character, again.Collection: Character
Write your goddamned book now. The world awaits.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Dark
We have no choice. We need the communion of souls and only here are they awake.Collection: Choices
There's nothing to be gained from passive observance, the simple documenting of conditions, because, at its core, it sets a bad example. Every time something is observed and not fixed, or when one has a chance to give in some way and does not, there is a lie being told, the same lie we all know by heart but which needn't be reiterated.Collection: Lying
He wanted to fly in lightweight contraptions with her.Collection: Wanted
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 lateCollection: Car
And we will be ready, at the end of every day will be ready, will not say no to anything, will try to stay awake while everyone is sleeping, will not sleep, will make the shoes with the elves, will breathe deeply all the time, breathe in all the air full of glass and nails and blood, will breathe it and drink it, so rich, so when it comes we will not be angry, will be content, tired enough to go, gratefully, will shake hands with everyone, bye, bye, and then pack a bag, some snacks, and go to the volcano.Collection: Tired
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.Collection: Men
All we really want is for no one to have a boring life, to be impressive, so we can be impressed. ~ on the friends we choose.Collection: Want
In hospitals I feel palpable comfort. I feel the competence, the expertise, so much education and money, all of the supplies sterile, everything packaged, sealed tight. My fears evaporate when the automatic doors shush open.Collection: Doors
Why did we do that to Pluto? We had it good with Pluto.Collection: Pluto
She felt some measure of relief knowing that in the very least, on the open road she would have some time to think.Collection: Thinking
People say I talk slowly. I talk in a way sometimes called laconic. The phone rings, I answer, and people ask if they've woken me up. I lose my way in the middle of sentences, leaving people hanging for minutes. I have no control over it. I'll be talking, and will be interested in what I'm saying, but then someone-I'm convinced this what happens-someone-and I wish I knew who, because I would have words for this person-for a short time, borrows my head. Like a battery is borrowed from a calculator to power a remote control, someone, always, is borrowing my head.Collection: Phones