George Saunders Quotes

Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of.

One of the things I loved about my childhood was that I didn't feel like I lost my innocence too young, like some children these days.

Childhood - that was not my favorite time in my life.

The loss of Eden is personally experienced by every one of us as we leave the wonder and magic and also the pains and terrors of childhood.

I was bullied as a boy - lots of kids are, but hopefully most of us get on with our lives and grow up.

My childhood was extreme.

A lot of children remember seeing cartoons, 'Pinocchio' or 'Bambi' or something that breaks their heart. I remember seeing 'The Blue Angel' and it breaking my heart. It was the first time I realised there was an adult world - that adults could damage each other or destroy each other emotionally.

I used to be a dusty little child.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've felt comfortable in a suit. It all started when my mom bought me a three-piece Pierre Cardin suit. I wore that thing everywhere. Eventually I realized I was going to be the kid who got beat up in school, but I kept wearing it.

I couldn't wait to get out, and at 14, I moved into a three-room Georgetown town house with Dad. I never went back. When they eventually sold the house, in 1984, Mom had a goodbye party for 'Merrywood.' I refused to go.

'Ders' is something I've been called since I was six by neighbors and stuff growing up.

I was crawling out of the bedroom window with my older sister when I should have still been playing with dolls.

The first movie that ever scared me, I feel like it wasn't a scary movie. I feel like it was 'Dennis the Menace' or something.

Recollections of early childhood bear comparison to fairy tales, and ... youth remains an unknown country to whose bourn no traveler returns except as the agent of a foreign power.

I'm writing a memoir. I'm four pages in. I start with my first memory, which is kicking my uncle in the balls. I was four.

People seem to forget what it was like to be a child. I think it's partly because they want to forget, because it usually wasn't as good as you thought it was, and so you want to skip over those things, and not have to relate to that anymore.

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.

Children's games are stronger than you remember once you've grown up and left them behind. They're always fair, and never kind.

The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who've forgotten their own childhood.

I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity.

The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.

I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town's Latin school.

CHILDHOOD: The rapidly shrinking interval between infancy and first arrest on a drug or weapons charge.

And this is what we called our childhoods. Little more than a dress rehearsal for adding our digits to the butcher's bill of war.