A Quote by George Saunders
I don't think much new ever happens. Most of us spend our days the same way people spent their days in the year 1000: walking around smiling, trying to earn enough to eat, while neurotically doing these little self-proofs in our head about how much better we are than these other slobs, while simultaneously, in another part of our brain, secretly feeling woefully inadequate to these smarter, more beautiful people.
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HeyHey is my favourite app. It's like Instagram but for sound recordings, with little soundbites from people's days. We spend far too much time looking down at our phones, so it's nice to have your head up while you listen to what other people have uploaded.
Do not let us speak of darker days, let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days: these are great days-the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.
I've spent most of my life living in cities where people are obsessed with looking down on people from everywhere else. You get so used to doing it that you start to believe it's simply what everyone does. It makes for an atmosphere of unwelcome that penetrates much of our modern life. It's a shame really because a couple days in Oklahoma will open your eyes to how much better it would be if the rest of the country was filled with a few more people from Oklahoma.
Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even love itself. And how much we enjoy it. Our happiest moments are spent trying to think up new varieties of victimhood.
Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.
Such short little lives our pets have to spend with us, and they spend most of it waiting for us to come home each day. It is amazing how much love and laughter they bring into our lives and even how much closer we become with each other because of them.
There is no doubt about it: we are judged by our language as much as (perhaps more than) we are judged by our appearance, our choice of associates, our behavior. Language communicates so much more than ideas; it reveals our intelligence, our knowledge of a topic, our creativity, our ability to think, our self-confidence, et cetera.
I've had smarter people around me all my life, but I haven't run into one yet that can outwork me. And if they can't outwork you, then smarts aren't going to do them much good. That's just the way it is. And if you believe that and live by it, you'd be surprised at how much fun you can have. “Any time you give a man something he doesn't earn, you cheapen him. Our kids earn what they get, and that includes respect.
The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.
In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.
When we see the Beloved in each person, it's like walking through a garden, watching flowers bloom all around us.
When I think about [characters], I like to think of them in their relationships to each other. In the same way, I think that's how humans are ultimately defined. We are our relationships to one another. And a lot of what's interesting about us happens in the context of other people.
If you get under water, you're at the mercy of our team coming in and getting us before we get another one on the head, and another one on the head, and another one. Or, we have to be able to handle it, and that's where our trainer and our coaches and our people who help us stay fit come into play, the other part of the team.
We all sorely complain of the shortness of time, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives are either spent in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do. We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them.
I wanted to show people that doctors are humans, too. It's important for us to be around other people - that way, we can understand our patients better rather than just walking into a room, barking orders, and walking out.
Every day, every one of us sets the stage for our sentiment, our confidence, and our success by getting dressed. When you feel great, when you feel your best, it opens up a world of possibility. Feeling confident and self-assured are important inputs into good days, successful days, and happy days.
From the first days of my career as an entrepreneur, I have always used my own and my team's lack of experience to our advantage. In fact, at our first venture, Student magazine, we used our newcomer status to secure great interviews and generate publicity - people were excited about our new project and wanted to get involved. Our inexperience fed our restless enthusiasm for trying new things, which became part of our core mission.
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
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