Quotes from George Saunders

We've said that a story is a system for the transfer of energy. Energy made in the early pages gets transferred along through the story, passed from section to section, like a bucket of water headed for a fire, and the hope is that not a drop gets lost.

My point is that it's not the flavor of your taste that matters; it's the intensity with which you apply your taste that will cause the resulting work of art to feel highly organized.

The story of life is the story of the same basic mind readdressing the same problems in the same already discredited ways.

causation is what creates the appearance of meaning. "The queen died, and then the king died" (E. M. Forster's famous formulation) describes two unrelated events occurring in sequence. It doesn't mean anything. "The queen died, and the king died of grief " puts those events into relation; we understand that one caused the other.

He has access to limited outrage. Sooner than we expect him to, he accepts his terrifying new state and goes on living, sad, peeved, but not rebellious; that would be impolite.

endeavor to do something for us so that we might do something for ourselves. We are ready sir....

Afterward Freddie takes us to Trabanti's for lunch. Last year Trabanti died and three Vietnamese families went in together and bought the place, and it still serves pasta and pizza and the big oil of Trabanti is still on the wall but now from the kitchen comes this very pretty Vietnamese music and the food is somehow better.

It is a hard, humdrum existence, and only stolid cart horses like Marya Vasilyevna can bear it for a long time; lively, alert, impressionable people who talk about their calling and about serving the ideal are soon weary of it and give up the work.

We were as we were! the bass lisper barked. 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 our experience up until that moment .

Writing about Gregor von Rezzori's classic Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, Deborah Eisenberg pointed out the great harm that can be done by a handful of evil people, as long as they have the "passive assistance of many, many other people who glance out of the windows of their secure homes and see a cloudless sky." She goes on to list the sins of such passive people: "carelessness, poor logic, casual snobbery—either social or intellectual—inattentiveness.

The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one's intent, equals the evil one will do.

Art doesn't have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly." "Formulate them correctly" might be taken to mean: "make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it.

And yet I knew with all my heart that Mr. Lincoln was President. We were at war. We were not at war. All was chaos. All was calm. A device had been invented for distant communication. No such device existed. Nor ever could. The notion was mad. And yet I had seen it, had used it; could hear, in my mind, the sound it made as it functioned. It was: telegraph. My God!

For every hundred bucks I make, I set aside five for Bernie's stone. What do you write on something like that? LIFE PASSED HER BY? DIED DISAPPOINTED? CAME BACK TO LIFE BUT FELL APART?

Why Does My Loved One Appear Somewhat Larger?

The cheeks of the sailors grew pale at the sight—and their eyes glistened with the gleam of the light—and the smoke in thick wreaths mounted higher and higher—Oh God it is fearful to perish by fire! Kunhardt

You may have herd the Yuman frase, What are frends for? Well, I will tell you. Frends are for, when your hole Groop terns its baks on you, here comes your frend, Fox 7, of who I spoke of erlyer, as being the first Fox I ever spoke Yuman to, troting up beside you.

and I though, Well, sir, if we are going to make a sadness party of it, I have some sadness about which I think someone as powerful as you might like to know. (..) , and all the things that they had endured, thinking, 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.

Every minit with no kikking and stomping now seems like not a real minit. Do you get what I mean? It is like some frend who preveusly was nise suden lee says some crool thing and does this nip on your flank. Even when he goes bak to being nise, you will never feel exact lee safe. And meenwile your other frends, who did not get nipped, are troting arownd with hapy smiles, going: Fox 8, why so glum?

I have grown comfortable having these Dead for company, and find them agreeable companions, over there in their Soil & cold stone Houses. In "Wartime Washington: The Civil War Letters of Isabelle Perkins," compiled and edited by Nash Perkins III, entry of February 25, 1862.

His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked

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

We were low, lost, an object of ridicule, had almost nothing left, were failing, must take some action to halt our fall, and restore ourselves to ourselves. hans vollman

You were just a caretaker. They didn't have to feel what you felt; they just had to be supported in feeling what they felt.