Quotes from George Saunders

They look stern at first, do a lot of scowling, but behind their eyes, once you get them talking, there's a hurt, docile quality, possibly related to past wrongs done them, a quality I associate with the thunked-as-kids: Long ago the world turned on them in some unexpected and unpleasant way, and they are, not unreasonably, expecting that it could happen again at any moment.

He was leaving here broken, awed, humbled, diminished.

How many times, through the long centuries of life on earth, has one group of men sneaked armed into the woods, hoping to surprise a second group not expecting them? And where has this gotten us?

Tell them we are tired of being nothing, and doing nothing, and mattering not at all to anyone, and living in a state of constant fear, the Reverend said.

Reduced, ruined, remade. roger bevins iii Merciful, patient, dazzled. hans vollman And yet. roger bevins iii

What a degraded cosmos.

I find I've been made sad by Minuteman dread. They take a fact and make the worst of it. This beautiful world, all this magnificence, seems to inspire in them only a fear that the beautiful world will be taken away.

I felt myself a new species of child. Not a boy (most assuredly) but neither a (mere) girl. That skirt-bound race perpetually moving about serving tea had nothing to do with me.

But (we stopped ourselves short) was this not just wishful thinking? Weren't we, in order to enable ourselves 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.

Ruinmore, ruinmore, we felt, must endeavor not to ruinmore.

To write a story that works, that moves the reader, is difficult, and most of us can't do it. Even among those who have done it, it mostly can't be done. And it can't be done from a position of total control, of flawless mastery, of simply having an intention and then knowingly executing it. There's intuition involved, and stretching—trying things that are at the limit of our abilities.

His heart dropped at the thought of the killing. hans vollman Did the thing merit it. Merit the killing. On the surface it was a technicality (mere Union) but seen deeper, it was something more.

Russian short story master Isaac Babel put it, "no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place." We're

Randall Jarrell said about stories holds true for the writers of stories: they "don't want to know, don't want to care, they just want to do as they please.

You are trapped in you, the beam said. Yeah, well, who isn't? she thought.

Just because a lot of people are saying the same thing loudly over and over, doesn't mean it's true.

Our path is not for everyone. Many people—I do not mean to disparage them? Lack the necessary resolve.

As that gentleman passed through, I felt a kinship.

The falsehood that exalts we cherish more Than meaner truths that are a thousand strong.

Strange, isn't it? To have dedicated one's life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one's life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one's labors utterly forgotten? lawrence t. decroix

And off they went, emitting a perfect major triad via fart-noises with their mouths

I think it's also important to remember that all excesses come from somewhere. Whatever irrational or evil act we observe likely felt reasonable, even virtuous, to the person who did it. (Keith is on a roll, until he isn't.) I think any of us could become such a person under the right (wrong) conditions. Otherwise, history is just a bunch of inexcusable things being done by morons who were nothing like us. And there's nowhere to go with that.

He had no aversion to me, is how I might put it. Or rather, he had once had such an aversion, still bore traces of it, but, in examining that aversion, pushing it into the light, had somewhat, already, eroded it. He was an open book. An opening book. That had just been opened up somewhat wider. By sorrow. And—by us. By all of us, black and white, who had so recently mass-inhabited him.

We could understand a story as simply a series of such expectation/resolution moments.