Quotes from George Saunders

We have loved each other well, dear Willie, but now, for reasons we cannot understand, that bond has been broken. But our bond can never be broken. As long as I live, you will always be with me, child.

What a degraded cosmos. What a case of something starting out nice and going bad.

He is going, he realizes. He is going, and will not be coming back as Brad. He must try at least to retain this feeling of pity. If he can, whoever he becomes will inherit this feeling, and be driven to act on it, and will not, as Brad now sees he has done, waste his life on accumulation, trivia, self-protection, and vanity.

Sermon: Why this surprising? Did you think you were going to live forever? Only difference between you, sitting there anticipating rest of your day, and Todd, in coffin, bound for eternal home in cold earth? Is heartbeat. Feel that, people? In your chests? This is thin line between you and grave. So why do you live like you are eternal? That foolish, you are fools. This scary? This not scary! This truth, this reality!

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.

Her hair looked like her hair in the dream and her eyes looked like her eyes in the dream, and as for her body, he couldn't tell, she was wearing a mumu.

Then I'm a paunchy guy in a room, with a note pinned to his sleeve: You were alone in the world, it says, and did a kindness for someone in need. Good for you. Now post this module, and follow this map to the home of Mrs. Ken Schwartz. Care for her with some big money that will come in the mail. Find someone to love. Your heart has never been broken. You've never done anything unforgivable or hurt anyone beyond reparation. Everyone you've ever loved you've treated like gold.

Mr. A calls me into his office and says he's got bad news and bad news, and which do I want first. I say the bad news.

The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.

What I'm putting forth, he said, is that the four of us make some memories, become fast friends and abandon starchy old mind-sets about monogamy. The world's gone crazy. Let's do the same. The answer is no, Dad said. And I'm surprised I'm not punching you.

On Final Twist , five college friends take a sixth to an expensive Italian restaurant, supposedly to introduce him to a hot girl, actually to break the news that his mother is dead. This is the InitialTwist. During dessert they are told that, in fact, all of their mothers are dead. This is the SecondTwist. The ThirdTwist is, not only are all their mothers dead, the show paid to have them killed, and the fourth and FinalTwist is, the kids have just eaten their own grilled mothers.

The main thing I want us to be asking together is: What did we feel and where did we feel it? (All coherent intellectual work begins with a genuine reaction.)

which made me feel the kind of shame you know you're not going to cure by saying sorry, and where the only thing to do is: go out, get more shame.

If at the moment when someone cuts us off in traffic or breaks our heart or begins bombing our ancestral village, we could withdraw from judging mode, and enter this other, more accepting mode, we could paradoxically, make ourselves more powerful. By resisting the urge to reduce, in order to subsequently destroy, we keep alive - if only for a few seconds more - the possibility of transformation. -The Thought Experiment

He was not perfect; he was, remember, a little boy. Could be wild, naughty, overwrought. He was a boy. However - it must be said - he was quite a good boy.

Because, as someone who does feng shui for a living, there's no way I could do my feng shui if I was whacked out on crack, because my business is about discerning energy fields, and if you're cracked up, or on pot, or even if you've had too much coffee, the energy field gets all wonky, believe me, I know used to smoke!

Oh, mansion shmansion. Did Gandhi's house have the largest outdoor trampoline in the tristate area? Did Jesus have a two-acre remote-controlled car track, with mountains to scale and a little village that lit up at night? Not in his Bible.

and finally, having lost what was to be lost, my torn and black heart rebels saying enough already, enough, this is as low as I go

It did not seem (and please destroy this letter after you have read it) that someone so clownish could disrupt something so noble and time-tested and seemingly strong, something that had been with us literally every day of our lives. We had taken, in other words, a profound gift for granted. Did not know the gift was a fluke, a chimera, a wonderful accidental of consensus and mutual understanding.

No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.

I'm bleeding at the knees and choking from smoke and have no idea who these people are or where I'm going, but at least I'm off the hook in terms of the hand jobs.

A linked pair of writing dictums: "Don't make things happen for no reason" and "Having made something happen, make it matter.")

Sometimes with all the teasing his days were subtenable.

Why was it, she sometimes wondered, that in dreams we can't do the simplest things? Like a crying puppy is standing on some broken glass and you want to pick it up and brush the shards off its pads but you can't because you're balancing a ball on your head. Or you're driving and there's this old guy on crutches and you go, to Mr. Feder, your Driver's Ed teacher, Should I swerve? And he's like, Uh, probably. But then you hear this big clunk and Feder makes a negative mark in his book.