Quotes from George Saunders

You know another word for party? Celebration. You know another word for celebrate? Have f——ing fun. Make f——ing merry.

At the end of my life, I know I won't be wishing I'd held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me.

Over the years I've felt: Kindness, sure—but first let me finish this semester, this degree, this book; let me succeed at this job, and afford this house, and raise these kids, and then, finally, when all is accomplished, I'll get started on the kindness. Except it never all gets accomplished. It's a cycle that can go on … well, forever.

Although certainly, dwelling on problems doesn't solve them. Although on the other hand, thinking positively about problems also doesn't solve them. But at least then you feel positive, which is, or should be, you know, empowering.

Your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There's a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there's also a cure. Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you—and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing else does.

A work of art moves us by being honest and that honesty is apparent in its language and its form and in its resistance to concealment.

We have SUVs and PlayStations and plenty to eat, we roam the earth expecting respect and receiving it, for we are the American Middle Class, and we shall live out the full measure of our days amidst happiness and plenty.

Then came the horror: worse than I'd ever imagined. Soon my arm was about a mile down the heat vent. Then I was staggering around the Spiderhead, looking for something, anything. In the end, here's how bad it got: I used a corner of the desk. What's death like? You're briefly unlimited. I sailed right through the roof.

It's the freaking American way--you start out in a dangerous craphole and work hard so you can someday move up to a somewhat less dangerous craphole. And finally maybe you get a mansion.

that's really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.

We were as we were" …"how could we have been otherwise? Or, being that way, have done otherwise? We were that way, at that time, and had been led to that place, not by any innate evil in ourselves, but by the state of our cognition and experience up until that moment

Hump my hump, My stumpy lumpy hump! Hump my dump, you lumpy slumpy dump! I'll dump your hump, and then just hump your dump, You lumpy frumply clump.

Oh it was nice, he said sadly. So nice there. But we can't go back. To how we were. All we can do is what we should.

Mary Lincoln's mental health had never been good, and the loss of young Willie ended her life as a functional wife and mother. In "A Mother's Trial: Mary Lincoln and the Civil War," by Jayne Coster.

Then, with no change in size at all (i.e., while still child-sized), he displayed his various future-forms (forms he had, alas, never succeeded in attaining): Nervous young man in wedding-coat; Naked husband, wet-groined with recent pleasure; Young father leaping out of bed to light a candle at a child's cry; Grieving widower, hair gone white; Bent ancient fellow with an ear trumpet, athwart a stump, swatting at flies All the while seeming quite innocent of these alterations

If this isn't the essential American story, I don't know what is: Guy hews a life out of nothing, by working every waking moment, with no education, no government help, no external advantages whatsoever, and no ulterior motive. What did he want? A place where his kids could grow up, with less fear and more material comforts.

Who am I? Everybody. As Whitman said: "I am large, I contain multitudes." Individuals within that multitude are always flickering on and off within me, stepping forward, then receding. And these individuals resemble the individuals who flicker on and off within you. This is the idea on which fiction is built.

A parade passes. He can't rise and join. Am I to run after it, take my place, lift knees high, wave a flag, blow a horn? Was he dear or not? Then let me be happy no more.

The Outer Hornerites, deeply proud to be Outer Hornerites, staggered from wall to wall, overfilling their toluene receptacles and bellowing their national drinking song, "Large, Large, Large, Beloved Land (If Not the Best, Why So Very Dominant?).

This idea of existing on a continuum doesn't mean, "We are all good," or "We are all, brothers and sisters, exactly the same," or "All is forgiven, no matter what you do," but, rather, something like: "Wherever you are on the human continuum, I can know you, approximately. I'm going to proceed on that basis: whatever tendencies are large in you, must be here somewhere, perhaps smaller and/or nascent, in or me.

Presidential couple may be imagined by anyone who has ever loved a child, and suffered that dread intimation common to all parents, that Fate may not hold that life in as high a regard, and may dispose of it at will.

A story is an organic whole, and when we say a story is good, we're saying that it responds alertly to itself.

But (we stopped ourselves short) was this not just wishful thinking? Weren't we, in order to enable ouselves to go on, positing from our boy a blessing we could not possibly verify? Yes. Yes we were. But we must do so, and believe it, or else we were ruined. And we must not be ruined. But must go on.

We must try to see one another in this way. roger bevins iii As suffering, limited beings— hans vollman