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Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.

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

Criticism Media Sniping
I’ve seen time and time again the way that the process of trying to say something dignifies and improves a person.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Process Trying Way
The one thing about A Christmas Carol that always bothers me is that Cratchit is so sweet and perfect. He’s like an Ivy League kid who just is labeled “poor.” He doesn’t have any bad habits. He’s never cranky with his kids.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Kids League Sports Sweet
I don’t feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Feels Levels Prose
It seems to me that there are certain thoughts and vignettes and attitudes that I have always had the desire to represent.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Attitude Desire Vignettes
Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else, disrupting the delusion that we’re permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we’re saved!) other people are real again, and we’re fond of them.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Permanent Prayer Reading Real Suddenly
Goodbye. I am leaving because I am bored.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Crazy Goodbye Mad
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

Remember Thinking Writing
Why were we put here, so inclined to love, when end of our story = death? That harsh. That cruel. Do not like.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Harsh Life Stories
I have nothing. My model is I have nothing figured out, and I’m starting with some little nugget and hoping that it will talk back to me enough to let it grow.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Enough Littles Nuggets
I think people have come to expect that in artistic representation; that every work of art should be a work of extravagant hope.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Arise Art Future People Satisfy Thinking
Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Happens Used Writing
You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it’s not totally satisfied.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Book Creating Expectations
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
The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery.
GEORGE SAUNDERS

Artist Jobs Thinking

Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.

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Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.

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