(b. 1945– )
U.S. author and professor“Form is everything. Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry—sincere, maybe, for what that’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief…”
more info“He’s such a generous spirit, you’d be embarrassed to behave in a small way around him.”
more infosource: describing writer George Saunders, in “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year,” by Joel Lovell, New York Times Magazine, January 3, 2013.
category: generosity, goodness, integrity
medium: Magazine profile
“The school had some good teachers, mostly older women who didn’t care if they were laughed at for reciting poetry, or for letting a tear fall while they described the Battle of Verdun.”
more infosource: This Boy’s Life (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 182.
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category: education, school, teacher
medium: Memoir
“Like anyone else, she must have wanted different things at the same time. The human heart is a dark forest.”
more infosource: This Boy’s Life (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 143.
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category: ambivalence, heart, mother
medium: Memoir
“Some people are better left unknown.”
more infosource: This Boy’s Life (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 151.
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category: advice, dysfunctional, school of life
medium: Memoir
“We could see the moon now, a thin silver moon swinging between the black treetops overhead. Chuck kept losing the radio station. Finally he turned off the radio, and we sang Buddy Holly songs for a while. When we got tired of those, we sang hymns. First we sang ‘I Walk to the Garden Alone’ and ‘The Old Rugged Cross,’ and a few other quiet ones, just to find our range and get in the spirit. Then we sang the roofraisers. We sang them with respect and we sang them hard, swaying from side to side and dipping our shoulders in counterpoint. Between hymns we drank from the bottle. Our voices were strong. It was a good night to sing and we sang for all we were worth, as if we’d been saved.”
more infosource: This Boy’s Life (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 288.
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category: hymn, moon, music, redemption, singing
medium: Memoir
“When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever.”
more infosource: This Boy’s Life (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 286.
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category: adolescence, aging, dream, innocence, youth
medium: Memoir
“My first stepfather used to say that what I didn’t know would fill a book. Well, here it is.”
more infosource: This Boy’s Life (New York: Grove Press, 1989), frontmatter.
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category: book, knowledge, nothing, writing
medium: Memoir
“Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.”
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Tobias Wolff