Quotes from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“All I ever wanted was to know what to do.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“I hung up the phone, jubilant, and threw myself into a wall, then pretended to be getting electrocuted. I do this when I'm very happy.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance--this is why people tell me secrets--my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is ever lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“And there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“I was feeling everything too much. Everything pulled at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“3. There are bears and there are small dogs. Be strong like bear! If they take out your teeth, sit on the dogs. Bears always forget they can just sit on the dogs. Sit on the dogs.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“I wanted so many times while driving to flip, to skid and flip and fall from the car and have something happen. I wanted to land on my head and lose half of it, or land on my legs and lose one or both. I wanted something to happen so my choices would be fewer, so my map would have a route straight through, in red. I wanted limitations, boundaries, to ease the burden; because the agony, Jack, when we were up there in the dark, was in the silence! All I ever wanted was to know what to do. In these last months I've had no clue, I've been paralyzed by the quiet, and for a moment something spoke to me, and we came here, or came to Africa, and intermittently there were answers, intermittently there was a chorus and they sang to us and pointing, and were watching and approving, but just as often there was silence, and we stood blinking under the sun, or under the black sky, and we had to think of what to do next.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“You can't ever guess at life, at pain. All pain is real, and all pain is personal. It's the most personal thing we have. It eats each of us differently.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“Your life has been lived a hundred times. A thousand times. It's not all that great, really. Don't take it so seriously. Don't handle it so delicately.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“When we pass by another person without telling them we love them it’s cruel and wrong and we all know this.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“Maybe I wanted to be crushed, too. To be ready you need to be tired, and you need to have seen a great deal, or what you consider to have been a great deal- we all have such different capacities, are able to absorb and sustain vastly different quantities of visions and pain- and at that moment I started thinking that I had seen enough, that in general I'd had my fill and that in terms of visual stimulation the week thus far has shown me enough and that I was sated. The rock-running in Senegal was enough, the kids and their bonjours- that alone would prepare me for the end; if I couldn't be thankful enough having been there I was sick and ungrateful, and I would not be ungrateful, not ever, I would always know the gifts given me, I would count them and keep them safe! I had had so much so I would be able to face the knife in the alley and accept it all, smiling serenely, thankful that I'd be taken while riding the very crest of everything. I had been on a plane! A tiny percentage of all those who'd ever lived would ever be on an airplane- and had seen Africa rushing at me like something alive and furious. I could be taken and eaten by these wet alleyways without protest.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn't our parents tell us about the weight?

—What weight?

—The fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If we're vessels, and we are, then we, you and I, are overfull, and that means she's at the bottom of a deep cold lake. How can she stand the hissing of all that water?

—We are not vessels; we are missiles.

—We're static and we're empty. We are overfull and leaden.

—We are airtight and we are missiles and all-powerful.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“We were fools and now we were driving to our deaths in a rental car. Janet Jackson was tinkling from the speakers, asking what we had done for her as of late”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“I am too fucking fragile. I hate being fragile.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“Stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excuse the use of that second word, because I realize it's presumptuous. Also, excuse the first word, and the term in general.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“But that's one lifetime."
Yeah."
But while doing that one I'd want to be able to have done other stuff. Whole other lives- the one where I sail-"
I know, on a boat you made yourself.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“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.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“The water was not God. The water undulating slightly with the waves unformed was not spiritual. It was jagged cold water and it felt perfect when we put our hands into it, and it kissed out palms again and again, would never stop kissing our palms — and why wasn't that enough?”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“I would know that in any city, at an hour like this, there are people sleeping. That most people are sleeping. But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there are a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it's here that we need to be. That if we are living as we were this week, that we had to be awake with the people who were still dancing.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River, in east-central Colombia, with forty-two locals we hadn't yet met. It was a clear and eyeblue day, that day, as was the first day of this story, a few years ago in January, on Chicago's North Side, in the opulent shadow of Wrigley and with the wind coming low and searching off the jagged half-frozen lake.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“I know forever they will be in my house, the rooms of my mind, I know this and I have accepted this but while I know they will be there I want them dead there. I cannot have them breathing there! I want them in the floirboards of the basement of my soul.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“We have no choice. We need the communion of souls and only here are they awake.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“The woman serving me was wearing a white sports bra that looked like it had been mauled by tigers--desert isle chic. ”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“We both see strangers and react. We don't like to walk by people without nodding. We're broken when people are rude. Were broken when people can't meet us halfway. We can't accept the limits of normal human relations-chilly, clothed, circumscribed. Our hearts pull against their leashes.”
― Dave Eggers, quote from You Shall Know Our Velocity!

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