#mo

Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain. ↗

— George Saunders

#explain #moments #sum #sum total #total

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

What a powerful thing to know: That one's own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other. ↗

— George Saunders

#desires #finds #found #know #most

Valor is common but great souls are rare. ↗

— Bernard Joseph Saurin

#great #great souls #rare #souls #valor

I think in our time, you know, so much of the information we get is pre-polarized. Fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions and our neurology and our desires and our fears, so I think it's a nice way to neutralize that polarization. ↗

— George Saunders

#desires #emotions #fears #fiction #get

I didn't want kids to think that to be happy, they had to be famous or rich or live in the big city. ↗

— Dan Savage

#big #big city #city #famous #had

I was trained in seismic prospecting. We'd drill a deep hole and put dynamite in the bottom and blow it up remotely, which would give you a cross-sectional picture of the subsurface, which tells you where to drill. ↗

— George Saunders

#bottom #deep #drill #dynamite #give

It seems to me a worthy goal: try to create a representation of consciousness that's durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment. ↗

— George Saunders

#actually #consciousness #course #create #day

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore. ↗

— George Saunders

#cut #fiction #funny #happened #hasn

More and more these days what I find myself doing in my stories is making a representation of goodness and a representation of evil and then having those two run at each other full-speed, like a couple of PeeWee football players, to see what happens. Who stays standing? Whose helmet goes flying off? ↗

— George Saunders

#days #doing #each #evil #find