Life & Wisdom Quote by Dave Eggers

Buzzing “during tutoring hours,” Eggers frames a learning space like a small newsroom or studio: intense, improvised, and built around attention as the core resource. The line’s quiet trick is how it makes busyness sound like care rather than chaos. “Very busy” could signal institutional strain, but he pivots immediately to “same principles,” insisting that the crowdedness doesn’t dilute the mission; it proves the mission is alive.

The phrasing leans hard on service rhetoric. “One-on-one attention” and “complete devotion” elevate tutoring from mere remediation to a moral posture, almost monastic. Eggers is famously invested in organizations that fuse creativity with civic good (McSweeney’s, 826 Valencia), and you can hear that worldview here: education works best when it’s personal, when an adult’s full presence becomes the lesson. The subtext is a critique of standardized, scaled schooling without ever naming an enemy. If a room can be “very busy” and still offer “complete devotion,” then the real problem with many systems isn’t students; it’s design priorities.

Then comes the emotional engine: “boundless optimism” and “possibility.” Eggers isn’t selling a curriculum so much as a vibe, a cultural argument that writing and ideas aren’t privileges for the already-confident. The slightly rambling “and sort of” is telling, too: it’s spoken, not polished, suggesting authenticity over branding. Creativity here isn’t an elective; it’s the payoff of attention, the thing that becomes available once someone believes your work is worth taking seriously.