Life & Wisdom Quote by Dave Eggers

Eggers flips the usual modern posture - the one that treats human weirdness as evidence of rot - and insists on a moral order: goodness first, strangeness second. The line works because it’s structured like a correction. “People are strange” nods to the default cynicism of contemporary life, where oddness gets coded as threat, cringe, or selfishness. Then he pivots: “but more than that” is a quiet rebuke to the reader’s reflex to judge. The repetition of “good” doesn’t just emphasize; it overwrites the initial suspicion, as if he’s re-editing our mental copy.

The subtext is faith without naivete. Eggers isn’t denying chaos, hypocrisy, or eccentricity; he’s reframing them as surface phenomena, the behavioral noise that sits on top of a deeper, more reliable human impulse toward care. “They’re good first” suggests a moral prior - an assumption you choose before you collect evidence. That’s a risky stance in an era trained on gotcha politics and doomscrolling, where expecting decency can feel like willful ignorance. Eggers makes it sound less like innocence and more like discipline: a deliberate decision to start from generosity.

Contextually, it fits his broader project: stories that look hard at institutions and catastrophe but keep returning to volunteerism, empathy, and the messy solidarity of communities. It’s an anti-sarcasm sentence, almost stubbornly plain. The plainness is the point: a writer arguing that clarity and kindness are not sentimental, just radical in a culture that profits from our distrust.