George Saunders Short Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

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The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present.

George Saunders
My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you've spent your day.

George Saunders
Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.

George Saunders
My heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.

George Saunders
Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others).

George Saunders
I plan to continue to be overjoyed if even the shortest piece works out, because they so often don't.

George Saunders
Why were we put here, so inclined to love, when end of our story = death? That harsh. That cruel. Do not like.

George Saunders
So here's something I know to be true, although it's a little corny, and I don't quite know what to do with it:

George Saunders
I've seen time and time again the way that the process of trying to say something
dignifies and improves a person.

George Saunders
I was a scientist, albeit a largely incompetent one, since my freshman year of college at the Colorado School of Mines.

George Saunders
Kindness, it turns out, is hard - it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include... well, EVERYTHING.

George Saunders
Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.

George Saunders
It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.

George Saunders
I have lunch, flirt with some local grandmothers, undercut my flirting by crotching myself on the corner of a table as I leave.

George Saunders
According to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving. Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.

George Saunders
What a powerful thing to know: That one's own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.

George Saunders
He was a father. That's what a father does.Eases the burdens of those he loves. Saves the ones he loves from painful last images that might endure for a lifetime.

George Saunders
The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters to people are slim.

George Saunders
The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?

George Saunders
America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamorous reasonable voice.

George Saunders
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded... sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

George Saunders