531 Quotes by George Saunders

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate – and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.

There are days so perfect you feel: This is what life about. When old, will feel whole life worth it, because I got to experience this perfect day. Today that kind of day.

I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “Yuck, yuck, yuck, I’m gonna be evil.”

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?

Had been grandmothers, tolerant and frank, recipients of certain dark secrets, who, by the quality of their unjudging listening, granted tacit forgiveness, and thus let in the sun.

Success makes opportunities and so many of those “opportunities” are actually exemptions – from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle.

At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end.

Nostalgia is, ‘Hey, remember the other mall that used to be there?’

So say you are charged with, you and some of your colleagues, lifting a heavy dead whale carcass onto a flatbed.