Dave Eggers

For a moment, she thought it natural in a way seeing a plane fall from the sky can seem natural, too. The horror comes later.

[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.

Suffering 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.

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.

Who says we don__ 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__ some crazy idea, some outrageous ungrantable request. Don__ we deserve grand human projects that give us meaning?

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

[The long ride to Riyadh]When I first travelled, I was naive, sloppy, wide-eyed, and nothing happened to me. That__ 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__ almost weird.

Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane.

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

If you don__ 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.

__on__ you think the vast majority of the chaos in the world is caused by a relatively small group of disappointed men?____ don__ know. Could be.__he men who haven__ gotten the work they expected to get. The men who don__ get the promotion they expected. 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. These men can__ be left to mix with the rest of society. Something bad always happens.

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.

I was feeling everything much too much. Everything was pulling at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools. I sat on terraces and stared for afternoons at mediocre views. I was feeling overjoyed for happy couples. I would see or hear about people, usually people I hardly knew or didn't even like, getting together, finding each other after so much groping, and I would feel bliss. I was blindsided by familiar things.

Grief doesn't arrive on schedule, as much as we'd like to.

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.

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.

Always we learn things and then we forget them.

How lame this is, how small, terrible. Or maybe it is beautiful. I can't decide if what I am doing is beautiful and noble and right, or small and disgusting.