#ak

Japan is the only country in the world to have suffered the ravages of atomic bombing. That experience left an indelible mark on the hearts of our people, making them passionately determined to renounce all wars. ↗

— Eisaku Sato

#bombing #country #determined #experience #hearts

I wasn't made to take orders. My grandmother used to tell me: 'Laws are for idiots.' She was right. ↗

— Marjane Satrapi

#i #idiots #laws #made #me

It's always extremely interesting to speak at colleges. My books are taught in many colleges in America and are part of the educational system, so it's really important to me. I don't believe in so many things in life, but something I believe in is education. ↗

— Marjane Satrapi

#america #believe #books #colleges #education

Although as a sailor I despised politics - for I loved my sailor's life and still love it today - conditions forced me to take up a definite attitude towards political problems. ↗

— Fritz Sauckel

#attitude #conditions #definite #despised #forced

The scariest thought in the world is that someday I'll wake up and realize I've been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual. ↗

— George Saunders

#fear #habitual #hurtful #i #i love

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

#believe #briefly #center #delusion #else

To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway. ↗

— George Saunders

#anyway #care #caring #dedicate #happen

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

#been #capitalist #capitalist society #course #done

I think fiction isn't so good at being for or against things in general - the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application. ↗

— George Saunders

#against #application #argument #being #conclusions

I was a straight arrow, a control freak. I didn't do drugs or drink, and this was the '70s. I didn't like the loss of control. Which isn't exactly right, because I didn't know what happened when you did drugs. ↗

— George Saunders

#because #control #control freak #did #drink