"We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.“

-George Saunders

posted in age

George Saunders quote about age: "We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish."

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"Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another."

-George Saunders

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"I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar."

-George Saunders

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"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

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"I turned 54 this year and I find myself feeling like I'm in a bit of a race to get down on paper the way I really feel about life - or the way it has presented to me. And because it has presented to me very beautifully, this is hard. It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations."

-George Saunders

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"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

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"Whatever your supposed politics are - left, right - if you put it in a human connection, most people will rise to the occasion and feel the human pain in a way that they might not if it was presented in a more conceptual way."

-George Saunders

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Same Category

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"The first crocodile I ever caught was at nine years of age, and it was a rescue."

-Steve Irwin

"Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age."

-Anne Tyler

"Any young man who is unmarried at the age of twenty one is a menace to the community."

-Brigham Young

"If there is anything I would do differently in my life, it is that I would study business more. I'm trying to teach my daughter Chloe at an early age about investing and money so she's not afraid of it."

-Donna Mills

"What though youth gave love and roses, Age still leaves us friends and wine."

-Thomas More

"In a spiritually sensitive culture, then, it might well be that age is something to be admired or envied."

-Rowan D. Williams