George Saunders Quotes

That only shows you have no heart,’ she said. But her eyes said that she knew he had a heart, and that was why she was afraid of him

I seem to remember even from when I was very young that when you loved someone you also hated them for making you love them, since loving someone is so incredibly humiliating.

Laughter and bitterness are often the veils with which a sore heart wraps its weakness from the world.

I was an onion, layers and layers and layers under a thin, papery skin. If anyone had been able to cut me open, my bitter, irritating juices would have stung their eyes, and they would have cried. Although I couldn't cry myself, much at the time. But no one would cut me open.

I went through a lot in my life that scarred me pretty good. I built a wall around myself to the point where nobody knew what was really going on inside of me, including myself.

Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.

Any fool knows that bravado is always a cover-up for insecurity. That's the truth. And on that note, I'll say goodnight. God love you.

There's a lot of reasons you can think of to say why you act, but I can only say that it just felt good. At the same time, it felt really painful. It's still troubling and stressful to me.

Realizing that we've surrendered our self-esteem to others and choosing to be accountable for our own self-worth would mean absorbing the terrifying fact that we're always vulnerable to pain and loss.

All my life, I've been the kind of person who could shatter easily.

Sometimes I fight with my heart, then I open myself way too much.

You don't want to let on how hurt you are because some people will see that as a sign of weakness, they might use it against you.

The make-up and the costumes were me being scared. I needed to create a boundary between me and the audience. To project this bigger version of myself. Outwardly, it looked good, but inwardly, I began to feel horrible.

We put up these facades, of maybe strength of who we are, but inside there's this incredibly broken person.

I would like to be soft and warm. I would be terrified to be that way. I could be hurt if I were soft and warm. I could be hurt by something other than myself. It is harder to be soft than it is to be hard. I could be hurt by something other than myself.

Please stop looking at me, she thought, afraid of his eyes and terrified of her own heart.

Because of that she had never had enough energy to be herself, a person who, like everyone else in the world, needed other people in order to be happy. But other people were so difficult. They reacted in unpredictable ways, they surrounded themselves with defensive walls, they behaved just as she did, pretending they didn't care about anything. When someone more open to life appeared, they either rejected them outright or made them suffer, consigning them to being inferior, ingenuous.

All the shitty stuff people do to themselves... it can all be the same thing, you know? Just a way to drown out your own voice. To kill your memories without having to kill yourself.

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.

You can blame your ugliness for keeping people at bay, when in reality you're crippled by the thought of letting another person close enough to popentially scar you even more deeply. You can tell yourself that it's safer to love someone who will never really love you back, because you can't lose someone you never had.

I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist.

Do not tell everyone your story. You will only end up feeling more rejected. People cannot give you what you long for in your heart. The more you expect from people's response to your experience of abandonment, the more you will feel exposed to ridicule.

I am stronger than words and I am bigger than the box I'm in, and then I see her in the crowd and I fall apart.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

I'm still vulnerable and still weak.