Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers
Dave Eggersis an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He is also the founder of McSweeney's, a literary journal; the co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia, and a human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness, and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in several magazines...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 March 1970
CityBoston, MA
CountryUnited States of America
If you don't want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You're taking up space, air.
Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?
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.
Morning comes like a scream through a pinhole.
I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing.
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.
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.
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.
We are unusual and tragic and alive.
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.
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.
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.