Dave Eggers Quotes

I don't associate myself with anything. I don't associate myself with where I'm from or where I am.

I don't really feel part of any particular movement.

I've always been an outsider; a displaced person.

I have been an outsider in journalism and in the academy, because I never fully belonged to any of them.

I've never really fit in.

One of the interesting things about "outsidership" is that underneath it there's a longing to belong. I just wish the thing I refused to belong to - the species, Western capital culture - was a little more respectable. My one true relaxation is my flotation tank, in which I can either meditate or just drift off.

Don't you see? I'm not the spirit of any age. I'm at odds with everything and always have been! I have never belonged anywhere with anyone at any time!

I didn't feel that so much as an outsider when I started writing; I've felt that way all my life. I don't know, man; I guess I was just wired wrong. When I was growing up, I always wanted to be somebody else and live somewhere else. I've always felt a little uncomfortable around people. And I'm not trying to romanticize this, because it wasn't romantic. I wasn't trying to be a rebel; I just always felt a little out of it. I think that's why it's pretty easy for me to identify with people living on the margins.

I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.

It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!

Alienation and loneliness plant the seeds for rebellion and consciousness.

I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn't know how to connect with the people there.

I felt like an alien. I always felt like I never belonged to any group that I wanted to belong to.

I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.

I always felt like an outer-space alien. I was always breaking the fourth wall.

I couldn't say who I am, I haven't the remotest notion of myself; I am someone without antecedents, without a history, without a country, and on that I insist!

I’m not anyone,” he says. “I’m nobody. That’s what being factionless is.

And I, as I lived, in an alien landWill die a slave and an orphan.

And yet I understood the alienation of being around others who couldn't really see you or chose not to. I'd felt the self-loathing that came with being a fraud, protraying an image of what you wished you could be but weren't. I'd lived with the fear that people you loved might turn away from you if they ever got to know the true person hidden inside.

My schooling was very conservative. I went to Trinity School, and then to the Hill School, which is a boarding school, then to Yale. My parents got divorced in that period, and I realized I didn't have a life anymore. I was the only child, so a three-person family breaks apart. I ended up very conformist, very scared, very lonely. I couldn't go on with Yale, just couldn't do it. I'd been doing too much of that for too long. I didn't know what I wanted, but I knew what I didn't want, which was to go to Wall Street and join the crowd there.

I'm not the same as other people. I don't think the same. I don't do the same things. I just feel out of this world sometimes.

When I was younger I felt lonely... In terms of my thought processes. I had the constant feeling that I thought differently to everyone around me. So, I suppose I felt lonely for a home. I didn't know where I wanted to be, but I knew I wasn't there yet.

The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.

Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

Such a human waste, your eyes without a face.