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He Was Feeling Buoyant, Flexible. He Wanted To Go Jogging. He Stood. He Couldn't Go Jogging. He Called Room Service And Ordered A Basket Of Breads And Pastries.

-Dave Eggers

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He Was Feeling Buoyant,

Dave Eggers

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He Was Feeling Buoyant, Flexible. He Wanted To Go Jogging. He Stood. He Couldn't Go Jogging. He Called Room Service And Ordered A Basket Of Breads And Pastries.

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I Need Eight Hours To Get Maybe 20 Minutes Of Work Done. I Had One Of Those Yesterday: Seven Hours Of Self-loathing.

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In All My Life I'd Never Been Approached This Way, The Car Pulling Up, The Where You Going? It Was Something I Wish Had Happened Hundreds Of Times. I Was A Looker - Someone Who Looked Over At Every Car At Every Traffic Light, Hoping Something Would Happen, And Almost Never Finding Anyone Looking Back - Always Everyone Looking Forwards, And Every Time I Felt Stupid. Why Should People Look At You? Why Should They Care?

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I Always Like The Idea Of Doing Interviews With Somebody But Completely Seriously Not Ever Mentioning What That Person Is Generally Known For.

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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

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For Years I Feared The Opening Of Every Elevator, Half-convinced That From The Opened Doors Would Come A Bullet, For Me, Shot By A Man In A Tan Trenchcoat. I Have No Idea Why I Feared This, Expected It To Happen. I Even Knew How I Would React To This Bullet Coming From The Elevator Door, What Word I Would Say. That Word Was: Finally.

All I Ever Wanted Was To Know What To Do.

She Pulls Away, Pats Me On The Shoulder With Three Mini-pats, Like Those Used To Pet Reptiles.

No One’s Forcing You To Do This. You Willingly Tie Yourself To These Leashes. And You Willingly Become Utterly Socially Autistic. You No Longer Pick Up On Basic Human Communication Clues. You’re At A Table With Three Humans, All Of Whom Are Looking At You And Trying To Talk To You, And You’re Staring At A Screen, Searching For Strangers In Dubai.

He Was Feeling Buoyant, Flexible. He Wanted To Go Jogging. He Stood. He Couldn't Go Jogging. He Called Room Service And Ordered A Basket Of Breads And Pastries.

I Have No Idea How People Function Without Near-constant Internal Chaos. I'd Lose My Mind.

Well, My Background Is Journalism. I Don't Have Any Creative-writing Experience Except For One Class I Took As A Sophomore In College.

God: I Own You Like I Own The Caves. The Ocean: Not A Chance. No Comparison. God: I Made You. I Could Tame You. The Ocean: At One Time, Maybe. But Not Now. God: I Will Come To You, Freeze You, Break You. The Ocean: I Will Spread Myself Like Wings. I Am A Billion Tiny Feathers. You Have No Idea What's Happened To Me.

When There Is Pleasure, There Is Often Abandon, And Mistakes Are Made.

Tim O'brien's Book About Vietnam, The Things They Carried, Has Won Every Award, Is Studied In College And Is Considered To Be Definitive. But It's Fiction.

When I Was On The Bestseller List With The First Book, Everyone Who Knows Me Knows That Every Week It Continued To Be On The List Was A Very Dark Week For Me. Everyone Knows That All I Wanted Was To Be Off That List.

Having Lost People When They Were Young, You Feel Intimately Acquainted With Mortality, I Guess. Though I Procrastinate Worse Than Anybody.

But The Grind Has Begun. The Windows Don’t Open, And Even The Availability Of Near-constant Jokes About Jews And Mormons Fails To Stem The Tide Of Frustration, Decay. We’ve Reached The End Of Pure Inspiration, And Are Now Somewhere Else, Something Implying Routine, Or Doing Something Because People Expect Us To Do It, Going Somewhere Each Day Because We Went There The Day Before, Saying Things Because We Have Said Them Before, And This Seems Like The Work Of A Different Sort Of Animal, Contrary To Our Plan, And This Is Very Very Bad.

I Went To Public School All My Life And All Through College And I Liked It.

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.

Personal Things

The Only Thing That Everyone Needs To Look Out For Is Keeping The Students Reading Through High School And Thereafter.

You Know, It's Been Proven That 35 To 40 Hours A Year With One-on-one Attention, A Student Can Get One Grade Level Higher

He Remained, Weeks After Awakening, In That Period Of Early-morning Consciousness That Allows Easy Re-entry To Dreaming. His Limbs Still Tingled With The Residue Of Sleep, And Most Days He Wanted Badly To Allow It To Overtake Him Again.

We Have No Choice. We Need The Communion Of Souls And Only Here Are They Awake.

Every Part Of My Body Felt Electric. My Chest Ached And My Head Throbbed With The Great Terrible Limitless Possibility Of The Morning, And When It Came, The Sky Was Washed White, Everything Was New, And I Hadn't Slept At All.

This Boy Thinks I Am Not Of His Species, That I Am Some Other Kind Of Creature, One That Can Be Crushed Under The Weight Of A Phone Book. The Pain Is Not Great, But The Symbolism Is Disagreeable.

My Parents Told Me They Were Going To Kill Me At Least A Thousand Times Growing Up. "i'm Gonna Kill You," And Then They'd Whack Me On The Side Of The Head Or Whatever. And "what's Wrong With You?" And "i'm Gonna Lock You Up," And "i'm Gonna Throw You Out The Window," And "i'm Gonna Kill You." You Know, All These Things That You Say In The Heat Of A Normal Chaotic Household.

I Worked At Salon.com Way Back When They Started, And There's Just Unmeasurable Value To Distributing Words Online, Too, But I Still Get My News From The Newspaper In The Morning.

I Think Newspapers Shouldn't Try To Compete Directly With The Web, And Should Do What They Can Do Better, Which May Be Long-form Journalism And Using Photos And Art, And Making Connections With Large-form Graphics And Really Enhancing The Tactile Experience Of Paper.

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.

The Pain Is Not Great. But The Symbolism Is Disagreeable.

I Think I'm Far Too Hopeful And Trusting. That's Something I Got From My Mum.

Write Your Goddamned Book Now. The World Awaits.

Up There We See Everything, Oakland To The Left, El Cerrito And Richmond To The Right, Marin Forward, Over The Bay, Berkeley Below, All Red Rooftops And Trees Of Cauliflower And Columbine, Shaped Like Rockets And Explosions, All Those People Below Us, With Humbler Views; We See The Bay Bridge, Clunkety, The Richmond Bridge, Straight, Low, The Golden Gate, Red Toothpicks And String, The Blue Between, The Blue Above, The Gleaming White Land Of The Lost/superman's North Pole Getaway Magic Crystals That Are San Francisco.

Then He Got More Books. He Saved All The Books.

Writing Is A Deep-sea Dive. You Need Hours Just To Get Into It: Down, Down, Down. If You're Called Back To The Surface Every Couple Of Minutes By An Email, You Can't Ever Get Back Down. I Have A Great Friend Who Became A Twitterer And He Says He Hasn't Written Anything For A Year.

Maybe He Hadn't Thought The War Through. It Had Seemed Like Simple Fun When He Had First Pictured It, With A Glorious Beginning, A Difficult But Valor-filled Middle, And A Victorious End. He Hadn't Accounted For The Fact That There Might Not Be Much Of A Resolution To The Battle, And He Hadn't Imagined What It Would Feel Like When The War Just Sort Of Ended, Without Anyone Admitting Defeat And Congratulating Him For His Bravery.

When Anybody Starts Out With A Memoir, You Get The Impulse To Tell Your Own Story With Your Own Voice, And You Get All That Out In One Fell Swoop Sometimes.

We Have Advantages. We Have A Cushion To Fall Back On. This Is Abundance. A Luxury Of Place And Time. Something Rare And Wonderful. It's Almost Historically Unprecedented. We Must Do Extraordinary Things. We Have To. It Would Be Absurd Not To.

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.

And That's Actually The Brunt Of What We Do Is, People Going Straight From Their Workplace, Straight From Home, Straight Into The Classroom And Working Directly With The Students. So Then We're Able To Work With Thousands And Thousands More Students.

We're In An Era Where They've Sanitized Home Life In Movies To Such A Degree That There Is A Certain Home Life That Might Be True If You Have Two Perfect Parents, And A Nanny, And A Couple Babysitters, And Support, And Lots Of Money, And There's No Strain At Home, Or Whatever. But For Most People, There's Strain, You Know? There's A Lot Of Pressure, Things Can't Be Perfect, Parents Can't Be Perfect All The Time. There's A Divorce, There's Money Issues, Whatever. People Work, So You Don't Always Have These Vast Reserves Of Patience Every Time Your Kid Goes Crazy.

When You're In Your Twenties In A New City Where No One's From Here, We're All Sort Of Orphans. The Only People That You Can Count On Our Bunch Of People That You Work With And That You Know. You're Only As Good As The Reliability Of That Latticework.

Paper Is A Uniquely Beautiful Format, More So Than The Web, I Think: You Need To Invest In The Aesthetics.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Utopia: We've Turned Into This Surveillance Society And Become A Race Of Spies, Where We Track Our Kids And We Track Our Spouses And We Track Our Friends. I Think Very Soon There Will Be An Obsolescence Of Trust, Because It's Much Easier To Access A Person's Location Than It Is To Ask - Or To Trust.

When We Pass By Another Person Without Telling Them We Love Them It’s Cruel And Wrong And We All Know This.

So I Should Be Aware Of The Dangers Of Self-consciousness, But At The Same Time, I’ll Be Plowing Through The Fog Of All These Echoes, Plowing Through Mixed Metaphors, Noise, And Will Try To Show The Core, Which Is Still There, As A Core, And Is Valid, Despite The Fog. The Core Is The Core Is The Core. There Is Always The Core, That Can’t Be Articulated. Only Caricatured.

You Treat A Kid With Respect And As An Adult You Talk To Them As If They're Smart People. But You Don't Throw At Them The Trappings Of Adulthood And You Know, The Darker Stuff.

Also, I Need Deadlines, Just Like Everybody Else, Especially Coming From Magazines, Newspapers, And Stuff Like That. I Need Daily Or Weekly Deadlines To Get Stuff Done, Or I Continue To Do Things And Not Go Off On A Year Of Unproductivity.

My Voice And Movements Are Restricted By The Things I Own.

I Was Feeling Everything Too Much. Everything Pulled At My Eyes. I Spent Hours Floating In Pools.

I Am A Freak In Secondhand Velour, A Leper Who Uses L'oreal Anti-sticky Mega Gel. I Am Rootless, Ripped From All Foundations, An Orphan Raising An Orphan And Wanting To Take Away Everything There Is And Replace It With Stuff I've Made.

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.

Again The Greatest Use Of A Human Was To Be Useful. Not To Consume, Not To Watch, But To Do Something For Someone Else That Improved Their Life, Even For A Few Minutes.

Be Strong, Be Brave, Be True. Endure.

The Weird Thing Is That Working Within An Established Story Was Actually Kind Of Liberating. You Know The Beginning And Middle And End, More Or Less, So There's Less Pressure To Figure All That Out.

He Must Trust, And He Must Have Faith. And So He Builds, Because What Is Building, And Rebuilding And Rebuilding Again, But An Act Of Faith?

His Lies Were So Exquisite I Almost Wept.

Why Do You Want To Be On The Real World? Because I Want Everyone To Witness My Youth. Why? Isn't It Gorgeous?

Good Artists Exist In What They Make, And Consequently Are Perfectly Uninteresting In What They Are.

I Can Remember Exactly Where I Sat When My Teacher First Read Roald Dahl's 'james And The Giant Peach'.

Recently, I've Discovered Radiohead And Find Them To Be Quite Good. So Clearly, I'm Some Kind Of Musical Retard. (jonathan Ames, Middle-american Gothic)

I'm Never A Fan Of The Sociopathic Kind Of Reviewing, People Who Are Sort Of Self-immolating And Have Social Problems Or Whatever, And Let It Out In Literary-criticism Form. I Just Feel Like Book Reviewing Should Be Respectful And Calm And Not Filled With Bile.

It All Meant Something. Until It Didn't.

We've Lost That Very Simple Transaction That's So Pure, Where A Reader Can Say, "i Support What You're Doing, Here's My Dollar. I Know That You Guys Are Gonna Be Watchdogs Or Keep The Government Accountable, So Here's My 50-cent Contribution Each Day." It's Just So Tidy, And I Think So Inspiring.

She Felt Some Measure Of Relief Knowing That In The Very Least, On The Open Road She Would Have Some Time To Think.

Every Time My Brain Parks The Car Neatly In The Driveway, My Mouth Drives Through The Back Of The Garage.

If You Want To Write About People, You Can Make It Up. But If You Spend Time Talking To Someone And Examining What It Is You Want To Write About, You Discover A Level Of Detail That You Wouldn't Have Noticed Otherwise.

The Key Thing Is Managed Awareness Of Your Role In The World And History. Think Too Much And You Know You Are Nothing. Think Just Enough And You Know You Are Small, But Important To Some. That's The Best You Can Do.

If You Think I'm Annoying And Preachy Now, You Should Have Known Me In Grade School.

Humans Are Divided Between Those Who Can Still Look Through The Eyes Of Youth And Those Who Cannot. Though It Causes Me Frequent Pain, I Find It Very Easy To Place Myself In The Shoes Of Almost Any Boy, And Can Conjure My Own Youth With An Ease That Is Troublesome.

I Often Cannot Believe The Things I Do.

Because I Grew Up With This Naive Expectation Of People Doing Right, I Get Shocked By Every Little Violation.

It's So Easy To Print In The Midwest. You're Saving Months In Shipping And Customs, So We Have Started Printing A Number Of Books There.

Pain Comes At Me And I Take It, Chew It For A Few Minutes, And Spit It Back Out. It's Just Not My Thing Anymore.

Do Not Be Critics, You People, I Beg You. I Was A Critic And I Wish I Could Take It All Back Because It Came From A Smelly And Ignorant Place In Me, And Spoke With A Voice That Was All Rage And Envy. Do Not Dismiss A Book Until You Have Written One, And Do Not Dismiss A Movie Until You Have Made One, And Do Not Dismiss A Person Until You Have Met Them. It Is A F@*$%load Of Work To Be Open-minded And Generous And Understanding And Forgiving And Accepting, But Christ, That Is What Matters. What Matters Is Saying Yes.

You're Breaking Out Of Character, Again.

Still Though, I Think If You're Not Self-obsessed, You're Probably Boring.

I Went To Saudi Arabia In 2010, And Spent Most Of My Time In Jeddah And The King Abdullah Economic City.

We Would Oppose The Turning Of The Planet And Refuse The Setting Of The Sun.

How Had This Happened? Everyone In The World Knew More Than Us, About Everything, And This I Hated Then Found Hugely Comforting.

At That Moment I Was Sure. That I Belonged In My Skin. That My Organs Were Mine And My Eyes Were Mine And My Ears, Which Could Only Hear The Silence Of This Night And My Faint Breathing, Were Mine, And I Loved Them And What They Could Do.

I've Never Had Wifi At Home. I'm Too Easily Distracted, And Youtube Is Too Tempting.

We See The Beauty Within And Cannot Say No.

I Publish My Own Books, So There Isn't A Certain Editor I Owe The Book To At A Publishing House.

Publishing House

If Your Hand Doesn't Work For It, Your Heart Doesn't Feel Sorry For It.

They Were So In Love With The World, And So Disappointed In Every Aspect Of It.

Why Do We Pursue Information That We Know Will Never Leave Our Heads?

There Is No Faith Like The Faith Of A Builder Of Homes In Coastal Louisiana

There Are Many Saudi Women Doctors, And There Are Many Wealthy And Powerful And Well-educated Saudi Women Who Circumvent The Restrictions Put Upon Them, Quietly Or Otherwise.

Hello Frances, I Have Just Been To Health Class, And I Was Wondering How Your Feminine Parts Were Developing.

Humans Are Divided Between Those Who Can Still Look Through The Eyes Of Youth And Those Who Cannot.

Yes, A Dark Time Passed Over This Land, But Now There Is Something Like Light.

I've Purposely Stayed Away From Reading Much About Postmodern Theory, And Most Everything I Have Read Just Bored Me To Tears. I Don't Think Anybody's Written About It, Or Very Few Have, With Any Verve.

I'm Better Than You Think. I'm Even Better Than I Think I Am.

Better Than You

No. There Is No Balance, And No Retribution, And No Rules. The Rules And Balances You Blather About Are Hopeful Creations Of A Man Fearing Death.

Live Long Enough And You'll Disappoint Everyone. People Think You're Able To Help Them And Usually You Can't. And So It Becomes A Process Of Choosing The One Or Two People You Try Hardest Not To Disappoint. The Person In My Life I Am Determined Not To Disappoint Is You.

I'm Interested In The Human Impact Of The Giant Foot Of Misplaced Government. After All, We Encounter It Every Day.

You Might Not Be Able To Operate Your Own Learjet And Have An Unlimited Expense Account, But If You Have A Reasonable Expectation For A Print-based Product, Whether It's A Newspaper Or A Magazine, You Can Certainly Exist.

When I'm Doing Work Online Or On The Computer, It's One Thing. When I Want To Read, I Want To Go Elsewhere, And I Want To Be Away From The Screen.

I Don't Mean To Beat A Made-in-america Drum, But I Would Be Lying If I Said It Doesn't Feel Somehow Right To Be Printing Books In The U.s.

Once A Year, She Remembers That She Is Insignificant. Then She Forgets Agains, Because More Than She Is Insignificant, She Is Forgetful.

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