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Stay alert. The big moral crossroads in your life may not come labeled as such.

George Saunders

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George Saunders
Age: 65
Born: 1958
Born: December 2
Essayist
Fantasy Author
Geological Engineer
Geophysicist
Journalist
Novelist
Professor
Prosaist
Short Story Writer
Teacher
Amarillo
Texas
Bigs
May
Come
Life
Labeled
Crossroads
Alert
Stay
Moral

More quotes by George Saunders

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If you at least try to do the things that excite you, it will make you a more expansive and present person - you’ll feel, at the end of your life, that at least you took the shot.
George Saunders
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I do find the values in A Christmas Carol significant. It is important not to be mean and stingy and not to give up love for money.
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I understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.
George Saunders
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People who've written about Abraham Lincoln's writing emphasize how logical he was. His writing was a syllogistic tool. He would say, if A, then B, and he would reason through it. His late writing especially is so tight and so beautifully reasoned.
George Saunders
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Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.
George Saunders
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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
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Success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it... Err in the direction of kindness.
George Saunders
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It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.
George Saunders
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What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
George Saunders
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It's on us to investigate ourselves for any lingering sense that we are 'giving' equality. We are not. It is already given. And not by us.
George Saunders
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I'm such a baby if I even get a flu.
George Saunders
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Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others).
George Saunders
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The one thing I noticed retroactively was that the energy at those Trump rallies was off the charts compared to the Hillary Clinton rallies. The Bernie Sanders energy was as good, gentler, but there was a real passion there.
George Saunders
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I have a lot of theories about the beneficial effects of fiction, but I'm always trying to get away from them a little bit.
George Saunders
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Whatever you love, that will be an influence. It just will. So in effect the young writer's job is: go out and find some stuff to love.
George Saunders
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The best thing we can bring to any fight is a calm and compassionate mind.
George Saunders
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I guess what I'm trying to say is that whatever weirdness was going to be in there, I felt, had to be earned. And it had to be required by the emotional needs of the book.
George Saunders
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All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.
George Saunders
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In my personal and spiritual life, I reject that. I don't believe in that. I'm always trying to get my mind into a less judgmental place, making less rigid judgments about things like perverse versus pure. But in terms of prose, those sorts of oppositions seem to work.
George Saunders
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So many people mentioned this at these rallies. You go to these things and it's kind of like an oldies concert. I mean, it's not hostile.
George Saunders