My understanding of kindness is that we are hoping to be truly beneficial in every situation, and that this desire means a whole suite of things: being nicer, sure, but also being more aware, more present, more articulate, more fearless, less habituated, etc., etc. And sometimes even being firm, or having an edge, or even being angry.
George SaundersThat's what a story must feel like to me. It's not, "I want to write about a gravedigger." But you're walking along and - boop! shovel. "Ok, what does one do with a shovel? Digs a hole. Why? I don't know yet. Dig the hole! Oh, look a body."
George SaundersIn fact unrestrained capitalism is quite cruel and the cost is on the individual human, on his or her grace.
George SaundersThe 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 SaundersI've been reading about and writing about the Civil War period and it is so striking that slavery was never made right - [Abraham] Lincoln was killed, Reconstruction came along, and all of that inequity was frozen in place and carried forward rather smugly. So I think the burden is now upon us white people, to say that this systemic inequality offends us.
George Saunders