George Saunders Quotes

I think about death every day - what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid.

It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.

Since I was a child, death is definitely something that I think about every day. But I think that everybody does. You try and avoid it, but it's such a big thing that you can't.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

It's a weird feeling when you know you're going to die.

Not a day has gone by in my life when I haven't thought about death.

Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can't really understand why it doesn't obsess everyone - I think it does really, I'm just a little more out about it.

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.

I just don't get death at all. Yes, it's there. But I don't get it.

Dying before dying has two important consequences: It liberates the individual from the fear of death and influences the actual experience of dying at the time of biological demise.

None of us, in our culture of comfort, know how to prepare ourselves for dying, but that's what we should do every day. Every single day, we die a thousand deaths.

Of all living things, only humans consciously anticipate death; the consequent need to choose how to behave in its face - to worry about how to die - distinguishes us from other animals. The need to manage death is the particular lot of humanity.

I think there is, in our society, there is a growing fear of death, a fear of the circumstances in which I might die, a fear I might be over-treated or under-treated. But fear is always a bad guide. Death is part of life.

By the time you've reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.

He who doesn't fear death dies only once.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn't believe that we were mortal.

It's only Western civilization that, God forbid, you talk about dying, when it's the only thing we know for certain, right? Everyone's going to die, so what's the big problem? 'Oh, God. Don't talk about it. Don't think about it.' I mean, I'm one of them. I'm not a big fan of talking about dying.

I would hate the thought of dying full stop; I've got to be honest with you.

I don't think kids have a problem with death. It's us older ones who are nearer to it, that start being frightened.

I think about dying. I've come to realize we all die alone in one way or another.

Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.

People start to act very unusually when they find out that they're dying, that they don't have that many years left.

People assume that death hanging over my head would allow me to put things into perspective, but that's not how it works.

I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an inordinate fear of death.