Quotes from George Saunders

Of what Use is Life, if the Living Man doth not pursue Righteousness, & enforce Justice, as God granteth him the Power to do so? Was it a Happy thing, that a Fiend went about Unhindered? Must the Weak forever wander this goodly Orb unprotected?

Sometimes in life the foundation upon which one stands will give tilt, and everything one has previously believed and held dear will begin sliding about, and suddenly all things will seem strange and new.

that there's a vast underground network for goodness at work in the world—a web of people who've put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people and makes their lives more interesting.

She came to him now, stumbling a bit on a swell in the floor of this stranger's house.

This, it occurred to me, this was the undisciplined human community that, fired by its dull collective wit, now drove the armed nation towards it knew-not-what sort of epic martial cataclysm: a massive flailing organism with all the rectitude and foresight of an untrained puppy. --In the private letters of Albert Sloane, by permission of the Sloane family.

In a time of danger, the person sounding the paranoid continual alarm will eventually be right. A voice arguing for our complete rightness and the complete wrongness of our enemies, a voice constantly broadening the definition of enemy, relieves us of the burden of living with ambiguity.

hurt my feelings." No. When you reach my age, and if you are lucky enough to have a grandson like you (stellar), you will know

I take the tokens, get up, and buy, actually, two Cokes, because today is Twofer Tuesday, wherein you get two of whatever you order for the price of just one of those things.

Until lately I was one of them. Strolling whistling through the slaughterhouse, averting my eyes from the carnage, able to laugh and dream and hope because it had not yet happened to me. To us.

Perhaps, I thought, this is faith: to believe our God ever receptive to the smallest good intention.)

If my wife wishes to leave me, may I compel her at arms to stay in our "union"? Especially when she is a fiercer fighter than I, better organized, quite determined to be free of me?

So we have the dilemma put to us, What to do, when his power must continue two years longer and when the existence of our country may be endangered before he can be replaced by a man of sense. How hard, in order to save the country, to sustain a man who is incompetent.

Then I imagined a whole world of people toiling in the shadow of approaching ruin, exhausting their strength and grace, while above them a whole other world of people puttered around, enjoying the good things of life, staying at the Burj just because they could. And I left my ATM woes out of it and just wrote: Paucity = Rage.

No one who has ever done anything worth doing has gone uncriticized. As regards the matter at hand (as regards him), I am, at least, above any— Thus thought Mr. Lincoln. But

Art, at its best, is a kind of uncontrolled yet disciplined Yelp, made by one of us who, because of the brain he was born with and the experiences he has had and the training he has received, is able to emit a Yelp that contains all of the joys, miseries, and contradictions of life as it is actually lived.

Because I loved him so and am in the habit of loving him and that love must take the form of fussing and worry and doing. Only there is nothing left to do.

When confronted with some little unfairness, his face would darken with concern, and his eyes well up with tears, as if, in that unfortunate particular, he had intuited the injustice of the larger enterprise. Once a playmate brought along a dead robin he had just killed with a stone, held tong-like between two sticks. Willie spoke brusquely to the boy, seized the bird away, took it off to bury it, was low and quiet for the rest of the day.

All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be. It was the nature of things. Though on the surface is seemed every person was different, this was not true. At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end; the many loses we must experience on the way to that end. We must try to see one another in this way. As suffering limited beings- Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.

Everyone had a thing, or several things, and her view was, if you loved the universe (which she did, or liked to think she did, or anyway sure tried to) you had to love all of it .

With Chikens, we have a Super Fare Deel, which is: they make the egs, we take the egs, they make more egs. And sometimes may even eat a live Chiken, shud that Chiken consent to be eaten by us, threw faling to run away upon are approche, after she has been looking for feed in a stump.

So asked myself: What mite somewhat retreev the old and hope full me? And replyed: Some ansers. Which is why I am riting this leter to you Yumans. I wud like to know what is rong with you peeple.

And yet, it was beautiful, what just happened in that pub, and needed. Something lovely in these people rose to the occasion. And overflowing with loveliness, they got totally wasted.

Now it seems like the gud times are mere lee smoke that, upon blowing away, here is the reel life, which is: rok hats, kikking, stomping. Every minit with no kikking and stomping now seems like not a real minit.

We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.