George Saunders Quotes

I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice.

Everything in life is gray, you know.

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

I think we do good things and bad things, sometimes simultaneously - or they may be the same thing.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.

There is a soul of truth in error; there is a soul of good in evil.

Even a sheet of paper has two sides.

For everything that you find dreadful, there's usually something that is rather marvelous as well.

It took me a long time to learn both good and bad can exist simultaneously.

I think it's common to want to label things as all good or all bad and what I'm finding is that every situation, person, event, has good and bad in it.

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke strops our vice.

Is it good or bad?" she asked Issa. The wrong question, she knew. She just couldn't help herself. "It's both, sweet girl," said Issa. "like everything.

The vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as poisons into that of medicines. Prudence collects and arranges them, and uses them beneficially against the ills of life.

Ah, Miss Harriet, it would do us no harm to remember oftener than we do, that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph.

Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you imagine

Dusk is just an illusion because the sun is either above the horizon or below it. And that means that day and night are linked in a way that few things are there cannot be one without the other yet they cannot exist at the same time. How would it feel I remember wondering to be always together yet forever apart?

History teaches us virtue, but nature never ceases to teachh us vice.

It's all very simple, or else it's all very complex, or perhaps it's neither, or both.

Good and bad may not be dissevered; There is, as there should be, a commingling.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our own virtues.

There is a soul of truth in error; there is a soul of good in evil.

I know it was more than that. But it was also less than that, too.