Explore Quotes by Dave Eggers

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.

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

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

People are strange, but more than that, they're good. They're good first, then strange.

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

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

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

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.

It was always difficult to get cattle returned once a marriage was dissolved.

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.

You know, it's been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher

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.

Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a f@*$%load of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.

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.

Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.

WHEN we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don't blame the soldiers.

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 we die. 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.

You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.

Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?

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.

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.