A funny thing happened on the way to utopia: We've turned into this surveillance society and become a race of spies, where we track our kids and we track our spouses and we track our friends. I think very soon there will be an obsolescence of trust, because it's much easier to access a person's location than it is to ask - or to trust.

Dave Eggers

Categorized in : Thinking Kids Track

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.

Dave Eggers

carpe-diem love thinking

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

Dave Eggers

alive life people

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.

Dave Eggers

might people world

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

Dave Eggers

extraordinary-things absurd would-be

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

Dave Eggers

ladders motivational inspirational

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.

Dave Eggers

pain color wings

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

Dave Eggers

stopping unique book

We see the beauty within and cannot say no.

Dave Eggers

beauty-within inner-beauty

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.

Dave Eggers

minutes use watches

We're in an era where they've sanitized home life in movies to such a degree that there is a certain home life that might be true if you have two perfect parents, and a nanny, and a couple babysitters, and support, and lots of money, and there's no strain at home, or whatever. But for most people, there's strain, you know? There's a lot of pressure, things can't be perfect, parents can't be perfect all the time. There's a divorce, there's money issues, whatever. People work, so you don't always have these vast reserves of patience every time your kid goes crazy.

Dave Eggers

crazy couple kids

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.

Dave Eggers

spit minutes pain

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

Dave Eggers

disappear matter

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.

Dave Eggers

regret past needs

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

Dave Eggers

strange people firsts

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.

Dave Eggers

luxury ambition fall

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.

Dave Eggers

teeth strong dog

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.

Dave Eggers

chaos doors giving

There is travel and there are babies; everything else is drudgery and death.

Dave Eggers

drudgery baby travel

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.

Dave Eggers

couple light keys

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.

Dave Eggers

smart light kids