{"author":"George Saunders","author_id":"George+Saunders","total_quotes":73,"quotes":[{"text":"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.","author":"George Saunders","tags":["america"],"id":2387,"author_id":"George+Saunders"},{"text":"Sweet Evelyn, I think, I should have loved you better.Possessing perfect knowledge I hover above him as he hacks me to bits. I see his rough childhood. I see his mother doing something horrid to him with a broomstick. I see the hate in his heart and the people he had yet to kill before pneumonia gets him at eighty-three. I see the dead kid's mom unable to sleep, pounding her fists against her face in grief at the moment I was burying her son's hand. I see the pain I've caused. I see the man I could have been, and the man I was, and then everything is bright and new and keen with love and I sweep through Sam's body, trying to change him, trying so hard, and feeling only hate and hate, solid as stone.","author":"George Saunders","tags":["afterlife","compassion","empathy","forgiveness","hatred"],"id":20766,"author_id":"George+Saunders"},{"text":"I wander cowboy sidewalks of wood, wearing a too-small hat, filled with remorse for the many lives I failed to lead.","author":"George Saunders","tags":["apologetics","failure","pathetic people","reflection on life","regret","remorse"],"id":39298,"author_id":"George+Saunders"},{"text":"A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possibl, and as cautiously, because it knows its girth and the tight confines of the china shop it's blundering into. And it knows that no matter how well prepared it is -- no matter how ruthlessly it has held its projections up to intelligent scrutiny -- the place it is headed for is going to very different from the place it imagined. The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one's intent, equals the evil one will do.","author":"George Saunders","tags":["chaos","complexity","ethics","george","humility","intelligence","morality","saunders"],"id":40380,"author_id":"George+Saunders"},{"text":"[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.","author":"George Saunders","tags":["attentiveness","compassion","kindness","openness"],"id":63736,"author_id":"George+Saunders"},{"text":"A bad thing happened to you kids, Dad said. But it could have been worse.So much worse, Mom said.But because of you kids, Dad said, it wasn't.You did so good, Mom said.Did beautiful, Dad said.","author":"George Saunders","tags":["beautiful","children","trauma"],"id":67377,"author_id":"George+Saunders"},{"text":"So let me just say this. There are ways. You already know that because, in your life, there have been High Kindness periods and Low Kindness periods, and you know what inclined you toward the former and away from the latter. Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation’s good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition — recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us. It would be strange and self-defeating to fail to seek out these wise voices from the past--as self-defeating as it would be to attempt to rediscover the principles of physics from scratch or invent a new method of brain surgery without having learned the ones that already exist.","author":"George Saunders","tags":["motivational","optimistic"],"id":71277,"author_id":"George+Saunders"},{"text":"What America is, to me, is a guy doesn't want to buy, you let him not buy, you respect his not buying. A guy has a crazy notion different from your crazy notion, you pat him on the back and say, Hey pal, nice crazy notion, let's go have a beer. 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.","author":"George Saunders","tags":["acceptance","america","americans","buying","craziness","difference","disagreement","purchasing"],"id":73036,"author_id":"George+Saunders"},{"text":"Is this the baby?' I said.Ma turned on me again.'What do you think it is?' she said. 'A midget that can't talk?","author":"George Saunders","tags":["humor","sarcasm"],"id":76418,"author_id":"George+Saunders"},{"text":"Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.","author":"George Saunders","tags":["perseverance","victory"],"id":79484,"author_id":"George+Saunders"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":73,"pages":8,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}