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...

I try to get anybody coming to San Francisco to come to the Mission. Not to misuse the word ‘authentic’ – I think that’s such a troubling word – but the Mission really does have...

I should probably get a stone. A stone would be good. A stone would save me, would salvage all the damage we had already done, all the things we had given up or lost.

His frustration with some Americans was like that of a disappointed parent. He was so content in this country, so impressed with and loving of its opportunities, but then why, sometimes, did Americans fall short...

The house is a factory.

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...

The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excuse the use of that second word, because I realize it’s presumptuous. Also, excuse the first word, and the...

I am the Olympics.

If things continue this way, there will be two societies – or at least I hope there will be two – the one you’re helping create, and an alternative to it. You and your ilk...

Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane.

I’d rather people just borrow the idea and do their own thing in their own community, … Whenever people can just start on their own, without our imprimatur, all the better. The model works, but...

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.

Who says we don’t want to be inspired? We fucking want to be inspired! What the fuck is wrong with us wanting to be inspired? Everyone acts like it’s some crazy idea, some outrageous ungrantable...

I lost someone very close to me and afterward I believed I could have saved him had I been a better friend to him. But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

This morning there s first a predictable story about Darfur; an expert on African affairs notes that seven thousand African Union troops patrolling a region the size of France have been ineffectual in preventing continued...

I will tell these stories…because to do anything else would be something less than human. I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost...

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...

Yes, a dark time passed over this land, but now there is something like light.

We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.

I don’t think there’s a neighborhood where more writers live. There is no neighborhood in the world – and I’ve looked – with more independent bookstores in such a small area.

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...

Here though, there are no oppressors. 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...

People worried about our passing over into some robotic state, but we were so much like robots already, programmed and easy to manipulate.

Max had to think about these new developments. He hadn’t liked getting hit by a rock–his stomach still ached from then rock Judith had thrown–but then again, when his team had used rocks on Alexander,...

–Don’t you think the vast majority of the chaos in the world is caused by a relatively small group of disappointed men?–––I don’t know. Could be.–The men who haven’t gotten the work they expected to...

The death of a young person for no reason is an apocalypse.

We have no choice. We need the communion of souls and only here are they awake.

It all sounds good, and it seems to me, if a system would work, this might be the spot. But frankly, I don’t think we have any good numbers to tell us if it’s a...

I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver...

You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it [dignity]. It’s never dignified, always brutal. What’s dignified about dying? It’s never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an...

Thank you,” he says.”Thank who?””I don’t know. You?””No, not me. Jesus.””Thank you, Jesus?””Yes, Toph, Jesus died for your Christmas fun.

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...

If you don’t have something grand for men like us to be part of, we will take apart all the little things. Neighbourhood by neighbourhood. Building by building. Family by family.

Our town was rigid in many ways, in terms of the uniformity of things, the colors of skin, the makes of cars, the lushness of the lawns, but on top of that it was sort...

[M]y mother read a horror novel every night. She had read every one in the library. When birthdays and Christmas would come, I would consider buying her a new one, the latest Dean R. Koontz...

Status in itself is criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.

You better [start writing] now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your...

Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn’t our parents tell us about the weight?—What weight?—The fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If we’re vessels, and we...

First of all, I know it’s all people like you. And that’s what’s so scary. Individually you don’t know what you’re doing collectively.

The world, every day, is New. Only for those born in, say, 1870 or so, can there be a meaningful use of the term postmodernism, because for the rest of us we are born and...

The men who are dropped in a jungle or a desert and expected video games and got mundanity and depravity and friends dying like animals.

[After this interview Eggers is off to a meeting in midtown Manhattan. Then come more appointments and the following day a long drive to Pittsfield, Mass., where he will work a fund-raiser for Word Street,...

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...

You still know that boy. He was very angry at fourteen, fifteen, in summer and winter, at home or in the world. So angry that his face contorted in photos. The camera was a question...

They took my mother’s stomach out six months ago.

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

Dear Producers, Something is radiating deep within me and it must be transmitted or I will implode and the world will suffer a great loss, unawares. Epic are the proportions of my soul, yet without...

The issue is complex, but like many matters in Sudan, it is not as complex as Khartoum would want the west to believe.

The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard.

The country he had left thirty years ago had been a realistic place. There were political realities there, then and now, that precluded blind faith, that discouraged one from thinking that everything, always, would work...