I think it is time for a new pride in the intellectual life, and a new impatience with people who take pride in ignorance, or somehow use "elite" to mean "person who has taken the time to know" and then are eager to dismiss, say, striving, or the notion that improving one's self out of difficult conditions is a noble thing.
George SaundersA work of art is something produced by a person, but is not that person โ it is of her, but is not her. Itโs a reach, really โ the artist is trying to inhabit, temporarily, a more compact, distilled, efficient, wittier, more true-seeing, precise version of herself โ one that she canโt replicate in so-called โrealโ life, no matter how hard she tries. Thatโs why she writes: to try and briefly be more than she truly is.
George SaundersWhatever happens when we die, it would be really weird if it was what we had expected. Even if you were a lifelong Christian believer, it would be kind of weird if there actually were pearly gates.
George SaundersSuddenly absurdism wasnโt an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort โ and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.
George SaundersIf 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 SaundersWhat good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being.
George Saunders