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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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,...

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.

–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.

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

[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.

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...

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.

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...

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,...

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

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.

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

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.

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

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...

Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the tree calligraphic.

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 Drowned

The raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can’t cut corners.

It’s kind of cute, the IV bag.

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...

He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys whoa re part wolf and part wind do not get cold.

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...

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

This was a new skill she’d acquired, the ability to look, to the outside world, utterly serene and even cheerful, while, in her skull, all was chaos.

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...

Americans are born knowing everything and nothing. Born moving forward, quickly, or thinking they are.