Quotes About Humanity

Or to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you, I bet. It's a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I'd say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.

Err in the direction of kindness.

Every human is born of man and woman. Every human, at birth, is, or at least has the potential to be, beloved of his/her mother/father. Thus every human is worthy of 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.

Those stories tended to be located around the places where things went wrong, and people were cruel to one another, and so on. They reflected what was probably the most urgent truth operating in me at that time: oh, shit, things can go wrong, and if they do, people get hurt, and I might be one of them, in spite of the fact that I am, you know, me.

And that, by extrapolation, every person in the world has his or her inner orchestra, and the instruments present in their orchestras are, roughly speaking, the same as the ones in ours. And this is why literature works.

We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us.

One day, walking neer one of your Yuman houses, smelling all the interest with snout, I herd, from inside, the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds. They sounded grate! They sounded like prety music! I listened to those music werds until the sun went down...

Saunders writes like something of a saint. He seems in touch with some better being. He teaches us not only how to write but how to live. He sets the bar and also the example. He hopes we might see the possibility of our better selves and act on it. He seems sent—what other way to put it?—to teach us mercy and grace.

Only let yourself deal with a man without love…and there are no limits to the suffering you will bring on yourself.

George Saunders

At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end We must try to see one another in this way. As suffering, limited beings-- Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.

Though on the surface it seemed every person was different, this was not true. At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end. We must try to see one another in this way. As suffering, limited beings -- Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.

Death very much on my mind tonight, future reader. Can it be true? That I will die? That Pam, kids will die? Is awful. Why were we put here, so inclined to love, when end of our story = death? That harsh. That cruel Do not like.

In your life, there have been High Kindness periods and Low Kindness periods, and you know what inclined you toward the former and away from the latter.

At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end; the many loses we must experience on the way to that end. We must try to see one another in this way. As suffering limited beings- Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.

George Saunders

Who am I? Everybody. As Whitman said: "I am large, I contain multitudes." Individuals within that multitude are always flickering on and off within me, stepping forward, then receding. And these individuals resemble the individuals who flicker on and off within you. This is the idea on which fiction is built.

This idea of existing on a continuum doesn't mean, "We are all good," or "We are all, brothers and sisters, exactly the same," or "All is forgiven, no matter what you do," but, rather, something like: "Wherever you are on the human continuum, I can know you, approximately. I'm going to proceed on that basis: whatever tendencies are large in you, must be here somewhere, perhaps smaller and/or nascent, in or me.

We must try to see one another in this way. roger bevins iii As suffering, limited beings— hans vollman

As that gentleman passed through, I felt a kinship.

In these times, strange times that they are," he says, "seeing someone do something that's not patently selfish and fucked-up is like a breath of fresh air, good clean fresh air, not that any one of us would know good clean fresh air if a vial of it swooped down and bit us on the ass!

Sweetie, no one is coming. To see how good we have done/are doing. It is just us. Forever. Until a flood gets us or the air or food stops coming. What a joke, the way we live. The worry, the suspicion, the stress, the meanness. I keep dreaming that these dead are telling me what they would do if they could come back. What nobody has said so far: Rat out more folks and kick harder when asked.

Art, at its best, is a kind of uncontrolled yet disciplined Yelp, made by one of us who, because of the brain he was born with and the experiences he has had and the training he has received, is able to emit a Yelp that contains all of the joys, miseries, and contradictions of life as it is actually lived.