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Compassion doesn’t have to be weak or enabling; it can also be quite bold.

George Saunders

The great American denial riff is that you can do whatever you like and you always triumph at the end. The world is saying no, you can do what you like, but there are consequences. And maturity is to be able to turn to the consequences and accept them.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Denial Maturity Triumph
I think about how I conceptualize the audience. The trick is that they’ve got to be smarter and more worldly than me. So as I’m revising, I’m keeping that in mind. I cannot condescend, even a little bit. Every single choice that I make is motivated by that.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Choices Mind Thinking
And the brevity is part of the challenge. I like stories because I get them – I know how to make beauty, or something like beauty, in that mode.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Beauty Make Model Something
When I was a kid, I took ‘The Brady Bunch’ and ‘The Partridge Family’ very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Greek Kids World
Whole idea is really intriguing to me. If you took snapshots of ourselves throughout the day, the way that our mind is twisting and turning, then at the moment of death, the mind would be twisting and turning in the same way. But the Buddhists say it’s super-sized because there’s no bodily damper on it.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

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

Hardship Opportunity Struggle
According to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving. Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Becoming Graduation Life
My go-to default is to try to be nice, which I feel does less harm in the long run than trying to be, say, assertive. If I am nice and maybe too passive, I find that easier to live with.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Long Nice Running
Monologue is the most honest way to represent human beings.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Honest Monologues Way
Social media sometimes feels like a vehicle for one-dimensional sniping, more than true criticism.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Criticism Media Sniping
Goodbye. I’m leaving because I’m bored.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Bored Goodbye Leaving
What’s really baffling to me is the way that the technology has risen up to help us become more materialistic.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Helping Technology Way
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

America Nuts Voice
I had an experience a few years ago where I was on a plane in which one of the engines went out. I couldn’t even remember my name. I was just repeating the word no over and over.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Names Remember Years
Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Remember Steps Victory
I read to make myself feel awake.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Awake Feels Myself

Compassion doesn’t have to be weak or enabling; it can also be quite bold.

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Compassion doesn’t have to be weak or enabling; it can also be quite bold.

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