Quotes from George Saunders

Life is suffering, the Buddha said, by which he did not mean Every moment of life is unbearable but rather All happiness/rest/contentment is transient; all appearances of permanence are illusory.

Sir, if you are as powerful as I feel that you are, and as inclined toward us as you seem to be, endeavor to do something for us, so that we might do something for ourselves. 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. --thomas havens

Two passing temporariness developed feelings for one another. Two puffs of smoke became mutually fond. I mistook him for solidity, and now must pay.

Has he been to America? He makes a kind of scoffing sound, as in: Right, pal, I'm going to America. America does not like Arabs, he says. They think we are... I will not even say the word. Terrorists, I say. He shuts his eyes in offended agreement.

The world, I started to see, was a different world, depending on what you said about it, and how you said it. By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.

I felt myself a new species of child. Not a boy (most assuredly) but neither a (mere) girl.

Is some of our media very stupid? Hoo boy. Does stupid, near-omnipresent media make us more tolerant toward stupidity in general? It would be surprising if it didn't. Is human nature such that, under certain conditions, stupidity can come to dominate, infecting the brighter quadrants, dragging everybody down with it?

Today, at the stupa, it occurs to me that this low-level ambient fear constitutes a decent working definition of the human: A human being is someone who, having lived awhile, becomes terrified and, having become terrified, deeply craves an end to the fear.

Forbes had fully invested herself in her sentences. She had made them her own, agreed to live or die by them, taken total responsibility for them. How had she done this? I didn't know. But I do now: she'd revised them.

It was always falling down around you, everything has always been falling down around us. Only we were too alive to notice.

The world is full of people with agendas, trying to persuade us to act on their behalf (spend on their behalf, fight and die on their behalf, oppress others on their behalf). But inside us is what Hemingway called a 'built-in, shockproof, shit detector.' How do we know something is shit? We watch the way the deep, honest part of our mind reacts to it. And that part of the mind is the one that reading and writing refine into sharpness.

think, therefore I am wrong

It means that language can make worlds that don't and could never exist.

The terror and the consternation of the Presidential couple may be imagined by anyone who has ever lived 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. - In Selected Civil War Letters of Edwine Willow, edited by Constance Mays

Language is a meaning approximator that sometimes gets too big for its britches and deceives us

Some humans heer me speeking Yuman so gud they give me some Chiken, and I sit rite at there Table. And they go: How is it being a Fox? And I go: Fine. And they go: Foxes are our favrit Animal. And I go: Thanks. And they go: Why o why were we so stupid as to choose Dogs for our mane Pets? And I go: I reely don't know.

I was thinking the other day about the idea that you have a reader and a writer, and they're different and they're flawed and they're fucked-up, each in their own way.

I want to stab you, Dad, says the little boy. With a sharp sword, you're so dumb.

Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life"—he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.

Language, like algebra, operates usefully only within certain limits. It's a tool for making representations of the world, which, unfortunately, we then go on to mistake for the world itself.

As I moved about the room I would encounter that silver wedge of a moon at this window or that, like some old beggar who wished to be invited in.

Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to. The comic is the truth stripped of the habitual, the cushioning, the easy consolation.

Siamo andati via di casa, ci siamo sposati, siamo diventati genitori, abbiamo scoperto che il seme della grettezza fioriva anche dentro di noi.

If I had my way I'd move everybody up to Canada. It's nice there. Very polite. We went for a weekend last fall and got a flat tire and these two farmers with bright-red faces insisted on fixing it, then springing for dinner, then starting a college fund for the babies.