Dave Eggers Quotes

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

My daughter emails me. When your daughter starts to email you instead of talk to you... It's horrible. You cannot forget human communication.

What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people.

It must be that a man who shuts himself up between four walls must lose the faculty of associating ideas and words.

What did we do before we had cell phones and we just had to sit there and be vulnerable?

Stand in my lobby at 5:30 P.M., and there is no one who gets out of the lift who is not on a gadget. No one is talking to each other. I get in the lift and say, 'Hello,' and everyone's head is down tapping on a screen.

As efficiently as our phones connect us to one another, and as much as we take advantage of that, we must remember that they have the power to alienate us, too.

It's the smartphone that has turned adults and children alike into tech-addicted zombies, dumbly swiping and jabbing at their screens, oblivious to the world around them.

In every public space, everyone has their head down on their phone. Including me.

On the Tube, you never see anyone looking you in your eye. They're all looking down at their screen.

Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal - be it fax, phone, email, internet or whatever - human solitude will increase in direct proportion.

The more people are reached by mass communication, the less they communicate with each other.

I think it's a deeper issue on the lack of communication in our culture in general. It's not abnormal to see a family out to dinner and every person is on their phone instead of communicating with each other and that's pretty sad.

For the air of lonely men surrounded him now, a still atmosphere in which the world around him slipped away, leaving him incapable of relationship, an atmosphere against which neither will nor longing availed. This was one of the significant earmarks of his life.

I can't stand when I walk into a room and everyone's not talking to each other and just on their phones.

We have the alternative. "Do I want to be on the subway looking at these people, or do I want to be in my phone looking at my people?"

We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication.

Machines taking over jobs - it's the history of civilization. Replacing farm animals, old forms of manual labor, now taking over small, menial aspects of cognition. But there's still plenty of room for creativity, for curiosity - many things that are related to passion, like art. But also, things about human communication and challenges, massive challenges that we left behind because we didn't want to take so much risk, such as space exploration, deep ocean exploration.

Nonverbal communication is an elaborate secret code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all.

When people talk to me about the weather, I always feel they mean something else.

Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.

What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?

In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life. ...Reflecting on it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of effective communication between people.

I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects.

Kids grow up connected to nothing these days, plugged in and living lives boosted to them from other people.