Dave Eggers Quotes

We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

People ask me if I am going to write my memoirs. But even if I wanted to, I would not be able. I have extremely few memories.

Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person.

I don't think anybody would be interested in my memoir - and my memory isn't very good either!

The next thing most like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing.

Stories are how we remember; we tend to forget lists and bullet points.

Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones - a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.

Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.

If i were to lose my memories, I would rely on music. There is so much of my story embedded in each.

Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.

These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.

you remember what is lost, and you forget what's right in front of you.

He was listening so I don't remember.

There is nothing that makes a man more self-satisfied than a poor memory.

Isn't it fortunate how selective our recollections usually are.

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.

My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.

If your life were a book, and you were the author, how would you want your story to go?

Women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.

Of all the faculties of the mind, memory is the first that flourishes, and the first that dies.

People forget years and remember moments.

I have a remarkable memory; I forget everything. It is wonderfully convenient. It is as though the world were constantly renewing itself for me.

One of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.