Quotes from George Saunders

Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others). If we learn what a truthful sentence looks like, a little flag goes up at a false one.

It was just a strong feeling in my hart that it was no gud for Foxes to give up and just be ded on perpose.

Our grief must be defeated; it must not become our master, and make us ineffective, and put us even deeper into the ditch.

What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary, someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being.

Show your cock, she says, and dies again.

And we rode forward into the night, past the sleeping houses of our countrymen.

Tolstoy is proposing something radical: moral transformation, when it happens, happens not through the total remaking of the sinner or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy but by a redirection of his (same old) energy.

You were told the big something/someone loved you especially but in the end you saw it was otherwise. The big something/someone was neutral. Unconcerned. When it innocently moved, it crushed people.

Then suddenly something softened in me, maybe at the sight of Ma so weak, and I dropped my head and waded all docile into that crowd of know-nothings, thinking: Okay, okay, you sent me, now bring me back. Find some way to bring me back, you fuckers, or you are the sorriest bunch of bastards the world has ever known.

Why must all nighttime farm windows be orange? is a sweet mystery to think upon as down to sleep you

Once again I am only who I am.

I guess I was sad that love was not real? Or not all that real, anyway? I guess I was sad that love could feel so real and the next minute be gone, and all because of something Abnesti was doing.

They were sorry, they were saying with their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone's affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he'd ever—

Even a Canadian baby with a harelip would be beyond our means.

Fox 8, jeez, how cud you not smell Poop of Wolf when it is rite on your own dang paw?

think of how lovely it all could have been had anything gone right, and then I think: Oh heavens, why prolong it, I've no income now.

For until we are ended, "never" may not be truly said. jack "malarkey" fuller And love may yet be ours. gene "rascal" kane

sir, the nation is tense, said Cliff gravely. It is asking itself how it can possibly stand idly by drinking gourmet coffee when an entire race is about to be disassembled. It wants to Enjoy, yes, but it feels it won't be able to fully Enjoy until some other closure is reached.

What was wrong with him? Why couldn't he be grateful for all that Mom and Dad did for him, instead of— Cornhole the ear-cunt. Flake-fuck the pale vestige with a proddering dick-knee.

There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go. - Christmas , In Persuasion Nation

never appeared ugly to me, for his face, beaming with boundless kindness and benevolence towards mankind, had the stamp of intellectual beauty.

We are ready, sir; are angry, are capable, our hopes are coiled up so tight as to be deadly, or holy: turn us loose, sir, let us at it, let us show what we can do.

and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone's affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he'd ever—

That day I learned a person can get used to anything. Soon it all seemed normal to us, and we even joked about it