01c. 1970 AD[The long ride to Riyadh]When I first travelled, I was naive, sloppy, wide-eyed, and nothing happened to me. That’s probably where the dumb luck came in. Then I began to read the guidebooks, the State Department warnings, the endless elucidation of national norms, cultural cues and insults and regional dangers, and I became wary, careful, savvy. I kept my money taped inside my shoe, or strapped to my stomach. I took any kind of precaution, believing that the people of this area did this, and the people of that province did that. But then, finally, I realised no one of any region did anything I have ever expected them to do, much less anything the guidebooks said they would. Instead, they behaved as everyone behaves, which is to say they behave as individuals of damnably infinite possibility. Anyone could do anything, in theory, but most of the time everyone everywhere acts with plain bedrock decency, helping where help is needed, guiding where guidance is necessary. It’s almost weird.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
02c. 1970 ADWe have no choice. We need the communion of souls and only here are they awake.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
03c. 1970 ADWho 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 request. Don’t we deserve grand human projects that give us meaning?Dave Eggers / quote ↗
04c. 1970 ADShe 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 / quote ↗
05c. 1970 ADSuffering 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.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
06c. 1970 AD[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 or Stephen King or whatever, but I couldn't. I didn't want to encourage her. I couldn't touch my father's cigarettes, couldn't look at the Pall Mall cartons in the pantry. I was the sort of child who couldn't even watch commercials for horror movies - the ad for Magic, the movie where marionette kills people. sent me into a six-month nightmare frenzy. So I couldn't look at her books, would turn them over so their covers wouldn't show, the raised lettering and splotches of blood - especially the V.C. Andrews oeuvre, those turgid pictures of those terrible kids, standing so still, all lit in blue.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
07c. 1970 ADFor a moment, she thought it natural in a way seeing a plane fall from the sky can seem natural, too. The horror comes later.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
08c. 1970 ADIt was a broken world, I knew then, that would allow a boy such as me to bury a boy such as William K.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
09c. 1970 ADYou 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 and his face did not know the answer.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
10c. 1970 ADWho were these people, all of them young couples, a few fabulous ones, tall thin-haired blondes with toned men in perfectly pressed jeans -- neither fearing the loss of the other.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
11c. 1970 ADThe raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can't cut corners.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
12c. 1970 ADDid children want sports cars for parents? No. They wanted Hondas. They wanted to know that the car would start in all seasons.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
14c. 1970 ADThe 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 out fairly and equitably. But he had come to believe such things in the United States. Things had worked out. Difficulties had been overcome. He had worked hard and achieved success. The machinery of government functioned.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
15c. 1970 ADWhy do you want to be on The Real World?-Because I want everyone to witness my youthWhy?-Isn't it gorgeous?Dave Eggers / quote ↗
16c. 1970 ADYou don’t know what it’s like to be a man over thirty who’s never had anything happen to him. You spend so many years trying to stay safe, stay alive, to avoid some unknown horror. Then you realize the horror is existence itself. The nothing-happening.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
17c. 1970 ADHis 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 of their best selves?Dave Eggers / quote ↗
18c. 1970 ADThis democracy thing, or Demoxie, whatever it is, good god. Under the guise of having every voice heard, you create mob rule, a filterless society where secrets are crimes.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
19c. 1970 ADIt is very much, she thinks, like looking at the moon and knowing one could make it there, too. It is only time and breath that stand between her and the top. She is young. She'll do it and have done it.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
20c. 1970 ADHere 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 communication clues. You're at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you're staring at a screen! Searching for strangers in... Dubai!Dave Eggers / quote ↗
21c. 1970 ADHe handed Mae a piece of paper, on which he'd written, in crude all capitals, a list of assertions under the headline "The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age." Mae scanned it, catching passages: "We must all have the right to anonymity." "Not every human activity can be measured." "The ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of any endeavour is catastrophic to true understanding." "The barrier between public and private must remain unbreachable." At the end she found one line, written in red ink: "We must all have the right to disappear.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
22c. 1970 ADSurveillance shouldn't be the tradeoff for any goddamn service we get.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
23c. 1970 ADIt was like setting up a guillotine in the public square.You don't expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
24c. 1970 ADYou 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 affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it's fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it.Dave Eggers / quote ↗
