Saunders Quotes & Sayings

He came out of nothingness, took form, was loved, was always bound to return to nothingness. Only I did not think it would be so soon. Or that he would precede us. Two passing temporarinesses developed feelings for one another. Two puffs of smoke became mutually fond. I mistook him for a solidity, and now must pay. I am not stable and Mary not stable and the very buildings and monuments here not stable and the greater city not stable and the wide world not stable. All alter, are altering, in every instant. (Are you comforted?) No. (It — George Saunders

We cannot break a law of eternal justice, however ignorantly, but throughout the entire universe will there be a jar of discord that will so trouble the divine harmonies that in the rebound we shall find each man his own hell! The sooner we arrive at this knowledge, the sooner we take the certainty to our souls, the sooner do our lives begin to assume the square allotted to us. — Charlotte Saunders Cushman

The right to die can easily become the duty to die. — Peter Saunders

I have a plan, and I'm following it. I can focus on doing what is within my control, and I don't need to be afraid of the results. — Elizabeth Grace Saunders

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

I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion, — George Saunders

One thing in our favor: some of this "becoming kinder" happens naturally, with age. It might be a simple matter of attrition: as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish - how illogical, really. We come to love other people and are thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality. We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we're not separate, and don't want to be. We see people near and dear to us dropping away, and are gradually convinced that maybe we too will drop away (someday, a long time from now). Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was "mostly Love, now. — George Saunders

I have plenty of friends," she says.
"Name one."
She looks at me.
Which I guess is sort of sweet. — George Saunders

People like him had these weird thick skins. You insult them to their face and it whistles past their ears. They take irony as compliments and barely even notice your wittiest retorts. When — Niels Saunders

Kind words are benedictions. The are not only instruments of power, but of benevolence and courtesy; blessings both to the speaker and hearer of them. — Arthur Frederick Saunders

Is some of our media very stupid? Hoo boy. Does stupid, near-omnipresent media make us more tolerant toward stupidity in general? It would be surprising if it didn't. Is human nature such that, under certain conditions, stupidity can come to dominate, infecting the brighter quadrants, dragging everybody down with it? — George Saunders

Kissing him last night at the pep rally had been like kissing an underpass. — George Saunders

When young, we're anxious - understandably - to find out if we've got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you - in particular you, of this generation - may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can ...
And this is actually O.K. If we're going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously - as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.
Still, accomplishment is unreliable. "Succeeding," whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there's the very real danger that "succeeding" will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended. — 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've been really lucky because I've managed to become wonderful friends with a handful of very talented British designers. Christopher Kane has become one of my very good friends - also Erdem. Jonathan Saunders is another brilliant talent who's very kind. We all hang out. — Laura Carmichael

What once were two, are one — George Saunders

The mind, it occurs to me, is an engine. There is an ambient mode in which the mind sits idling, before there is information. Some minds idle in a kind of dreading crouch, waiting to be offended. Others stand up straight, eyes slightly wide, expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Some minds, imaging the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of their help.
Which is right?
Neither.
Both.
Maybe all of our politics is simply neurology writ large. Maybe there are a finite number of idling modes. Maybe there are just two broad modes, and out of this fact comes our current division. — George Saunders

It's not fiction's job to be photographically representative of reality. If I want to make a fictional world where there's no kindness, this doesn't mean I believe there's no kindness in the real world. In fact, what it may mean is that I very much value kindness. Like if you make a painting in which only greens are allowed, it wouldn't mean you don't believe in blue. — George Saunders

We were all over each other in the super-friendly way of puppies, or spouses meeting for the first time after one of them has undergone a close brush with death. — George Saunders

A hip-looking teen watches an elderly woman hobble across the street on a walker.
"Grammy's here!" he shouts.
He puts some MacAttack Mac&Cheese in the microwave and dons headphones and takes out a video game so he won't be bored during the forty seconds it takes his lunch to cook. A truck comes around the corner and hits Grammy, sending her flying over the roof into the backyard, where luckily she lands on a trampoline. Unluckily, she bounces back over the roof, into the front yard, landing on a rosebush. — George Saunders

I'm one of the best finishers in the business, so I went for it. — Billy Joe Saunders

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. — George Saunders

Their brothers are their heroes, and if anything happens to William Saunders or Robert Young, Kenneth and Larry might blame everyone around them, because we're the citizens those men will have died for, and maybe they won't believe we were worth it. Are we? Have we ever been worth it, any of the times before? — Helen Oyeyemi

Whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it. — George Saunders

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." — George Saunders

[P]eople think of compassion as, like, kindness. The image comes to mind of some nice New Age guy bending to something with a look on his face like he's about to cry. And I don't think that's it. I think of it more as a quality of openness that comes with being in a state of unusual attentiveness. — George Saunders

flourished between three generations — Jemma J. Saunders

I find that the great artists I've met are people who are so playfully invested in their process that, even if it doesn't come out the way they like, they still power through and even take energy from it. — George Saunders

Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life"
he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit. — George Saunders

It really strikes me how much of your energy in America, especially if you're from a working back-ground, is spent just keeping your head above water. It really saps your grace and your strength. — George Saunders

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

When I'm skiing, I listen to electronic music. It's repetitive and let's me get into a groove and crank out the miles. — Ben Saunders

I'd always said that I'd like to have a title by the next Olympics, so this is a great opportunity, and could be the start of my climb to a world title. — Billy Joe Saunders

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. — George Saunders

So, good news/bad news: good news that I'm progressing; bad news that life is short and art is long. — George Saunders

I had a good chance when I went to Beijing and the guy who beat me, I'd beaten him three weeks before and he went on to win silver. — Billy Joe Saunders

At the heart of Vonnegut's voice is a humility my earnest young self didn't feel comfortable with: In it, I heard evidence of real humiliation. War really was hell, with hell being the place where whatever you normally counted on or leaned on was taken from you, absolutely. Bill Pilgrim is a skinny virginal dork, and when he gets to war, war leaps on his skinny dorkitude and devastates him unglamorously, and haunts him ever after. — George Saunders

Why were we made just so, to find so many things that happened every day pretty? — George Saunders

It's interesting to see how some of the womenswear designers that we have long worked with at Net-A-Porter are developing menswear collections - Christopher Kane, Jonathan Saunders and Richard Nicoll. — Natalie Massenet

...smile first, then speak. — George Saunders

The most hopeful thing in the stories, I hope, is wit. I make it up. If I make up a world in which we're ruled by big talking turds, it doesn't mean that we are. So you shouldn't feel depressed ... — George Saunders

Sucess is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it ... Err in the direction of kindness. — George Saunders

The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don't know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them - if the storytelling is good enough - we imagine them as being, essentially, like us. If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, incontrovertible. — George Saunders

If a writer understands his work as something that originates with him but then, with any luck, gets away from him, then what he needs is someone who can grasp the potential of the piece and lead him to that higher ground. — George Saunders

His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help, or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it. — George Saunders

I say it must have been great to grow up when men were men. He says men have always been what the are now, namely incapable of coping with life without the intervention of God the Almighty. Then in the oven behind him my pizza starts smoking and he says case in point. — George Saunders

If I'm writing a story and you're reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process. — George Saunders

Think of how lovely it all could have been had anything gone right, and then I think: Oh heavens, why prolong it, I've no income now. — George Saunders

I've had the thought that a person's 'artistic vision' is really just the cumulative combination of whatever particular stances he has sincerely occupied during his creative life - even if some of those might appear contradictory. — George Saunders

A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did. — George Saunders

I've noticed that nowadays I'm doing a lot of stuff on the phone and on the computer, which I usually wouldn't do earlier. And I can feel my brain being rewired: I'm getting anxious, I'm getting more manic. Now, I'm an extreme case because I'm old and I'm overdoing it. But still, it's really interesting that I can actually feel a change in my neurochemistry from this interaction with the technology. — 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 glamourous reasonable voice. — George Saunders

What I'm primarily saying,' he says, 'is that this is a time for knowledge assimilation, not backstabbing. We learned a lesson, you and I. We personally grew. Gratitude for this growth is an appropriate response. Gratitude, and being careful never to make the same mistake twice. — George Saunders

In a sense my whole life as a writer is trying to find structural ways, or formal ways, to permit that outflowing so it doesn't just look like crazy output. In other words, if it turns out that you can do a given voice, that's just kind of inclination. But then if you can find a way to put that voice in a story so that the voice serves a purpose, then I would say that's being a writer. — George Saunders

You matter because you are you, and you matter to the end of your life. We will do all we can not only to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die. — Cicely Saunders

A woman with a hazel eye never elopes from her husband, never chats scandal, never finds fault, never talks too much nor too little
always is an entertaining, intellectual, agreeable and lovely creature. — Arthur Frederick 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

Approaches to death and dying reveal much of the attitude of society as a whole to the individuals who compose it. The development of ideas of what constitutes a good death can even be traced to prehistory. — Cicely Saunders

O.K., then, all right, they would adopt a white-trash dog. Ha ha. They could name it Zeke, buy it a little corncob pipe and a straw hat. She imagined the puppy, having crapped on the rug, looking up at her, going, Cain't hep it. But no. Had she come from a perfect place? Everything was transmutable. She imagined the puppy grown up, entertaining some friends, speaking to them in a British accent: My family of origin was, um, rather not, shall we say, of the most respectable ...
Ha ha, wow, the mind was amazing, always cranking out these - — George Saunders

He sent the trained dog that is his talent off in search of a fat glorious pheasant, and it brought back the lower half of a Barbie doll. — George Saunders

It seems to me that there are certain thoughts and vignettes and attitudes that I have always had the desire to represent. — George Saunders

It should, as Chekhov said, prepare us for tenderness. And in this regard it starts, I think, with intention ... Our intention is to crack life open for just a second. — George Saunders

I think I love and reverence all arts equally, only putting my own just above the others; because in it I recognize the union and culmination of my own. To me it seems as if when God conceived the world, that was Poetry; He formed it, and that was Sculpture; He colored it, and that was Painting; He peopled it with living beings, and that was the grand, divine, eternal Drama. — Charlotte Saunders Cushman

As a very young man I signed a declaration - 'I renounce war and will never support another'. That was in 1939 and I have maintained this stand throughout the whole period, including WW2, as a Conscientious Objector.Worked to achieve Peace since. It is necessary for individuals to take this stand and maintain it. War never solves anything - it accentuates any problem, whatever it is, and makes matters worse. There is no moral or humanitarian justification for it. — Donald Saunders

I write for women because it's the only way I can use what I've experienced. It's good that people like what I write, but I don't want to go down the feminist path. — Jennifer Saunders

Goodbye. I'm leaving because I'm bored. — George Saunders

There might be a different model for a literary community that's quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity. — George Saunders

Environmental scientists in Canada said it was impossible for me to get to the Pole in 2004 ... I said 'no,' it's still OK, and I can still get there, and I did. — Ben Saunders

Other artists - poets, painters, sculptors, musicians - produce something which lives after them and enshrines their memories in positive evidences of their divine mission; but we, - we strut and fret our hour upon the stage, and then the curtain falls and all is darkness and silence. — Charlotte Saunders Cushman

The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to the years during which the couple living in that house enjoyed true happiness. — George Saunders

Me just being myself in public or on TV is the biggest nightmare in the world. — Jennifer Saunders

title from the second album of the introspective beat group Joy Division, Closer — Graham Saunders

Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans. — Allen Saunders

Down in the city are the nice houses and the so-so houses and the lovers making out in dark yards and the babies crying for their moms, and I wonder if, other than Jesus, has this ever happened before. Maybe it happens all the time. Maybe there's angry dead all over, hiding in rooms, covered with blankets, bossing around their scared, embarrassed relatives. Because how would we know? — George Saunders

I loved Monty Python for the wordplay
this sense that you didn't have to squash your intelligence to be funny. In fact, you could walk right into your intelligence and nerdiness and self-doubt, and that could be funny. — George Saunders

I'm a really good driver. I've been driving since I was very small, and I do like driving fast. I remember the first time my dad taught me that when you go into a corner you change down then put your foot right down on the way out. I'm very competitive about driving. — Jennifer Saunders

The reason they keep it so tight is that no one liked them, so that without each other, actually, they couldn't exist. They support each other. They support their flaws and everything else. — Jennifer Saunders

Your time is your life. — Elizabeth Grace Saunders

What I mean to say is, we had been considerable. Had been loved. Not lonely, not lost, not freakish, but wise, each in his or her own way. Our departures caused pain. Those who had loved us sat upon their beds, heads in hand; lowered their faces to tabletops, making animal noises. We had been loved, I say, and remembering us, even many years later, people would smile, briefly gladdened at the memory. — George Saunders

For dinner Jade microwaves some Stars-n-Flags. They're addictive. They put sugar in the sauce and sugar in the meat nuggets. I think also caffeine. Someone told me the brown streaks in the Flags are caffeine. We have like five bowls each.
After dinner the babies get fussy and Min puts a mush of ice cream and Hershey's syrup in their bottles and we watch The Worst That Could Happen, a half hour computer simulation of tragedies that have never actually occurred but theoretically could. A kid gets hit by a train and flies into a zoo, where he's eaten by wolves. A man cuts his hand off chopping wood and while he's wandering around screaming for help is picked up by a tornado and dropped on a preschool during recess and lands on a pregnant teacher. — George Saunders

Pride, like laudanum and other poisonous medicines, is beneficial in small, though injurious in large, quantities. No man who is not pleased with himself, even in a personal sense, can please others. — Arthur Frederick Saunders

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish. — George Saunders

I don't think much new ever happens. Most of us spend our days the same way people spent their days in the year 1000: walking around smiling, trying to earn enough to eat, while neurotically doing these little self-proofs in our head about how much better we are than these other slobs, while simultaneously, in another part of our brain, secretly feeling woefully inadequate to these smarter, more beautiful people. — George Saunders

It is an honour to fight at the Royal Albert Hall. — Billy Joe Saunders

The terror and the consternation of the Presidential couple may be imagined by anyone who has ever lived a child, and suffered that dread intimation common to all parents, that Fate may not hold that life in as high a regard, and may dispose of it at will.
- In "Selected Civil War Letters of Edwine Willow", edited by Constance Mays — George Saunders

I did want a boy child because I had this romantic idea that a boy child when he's 16 takes his mother out for dinner. — Jennifer Saunders

Reality always wins. — Elizabeth Grace Saunders

I'm not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I'm just trusting that, if I'm working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book. — George Saunders

If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too. — George Saunders

And I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it - which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I fully intend to do, of course. — George Saunders

Ted, I swear to God, quothe he. — George Saunders

The notions category and functor were not formulated or put in print until the idea of a natural transformation was also at hand. — Saunders Mac Lane

I absolutely love Scotland. I'm always happy there. — Jennifer Saunders

Father," she said late one night. "I can't keep up. Our goats are dying. We're going to have to ask the neighbors for help."
"Have we ever done that before?" he said.
"We've never needed help before," said Capable.
"Well I'm against it," he said. "If we haven't done it before, it stands to reason that this time is the first time we've done it, which means that, relative to what we've done in the past, this is different, which I am very much against, as I always have been, as you well know. I have consistently been very very consistent about this. — George Saunders

Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous. — George Saunders

Err in the direction of kindness. — George Saunders

The closer I got to my finish line, that rubbley (ph) rocky coast of Ross Island, the more I started to realize that the biggest lesson that this very long, very-hard walk might be teaching me is that happiness is not a finish line and that if we can't feel content on our journeys amidst the mess and the striving that we all inhabit - the open loops, the half-finished to-do lists, the could-do-better-next-times - then we might never feel it. — Ben Saunders

A penny saved is twopence dear. — Richard Saunders

I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society. — George Saunders

I'm my own worst critic. I could tell the critics a thing or two about my shows. — Jennifer Saunders