#cruel

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another. ↗

— George Saunders

#answers #bad #bet #cruel #declines

In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger. ↗

— Maurice Sendak

#child #childhood #complicated #crazy #creature

I couldn't watch Tom and Jerry. The cruelty was too much. I had all these strange images, of tiny animals, all mixed up. ↗

— Julie Walters

#had #i #images #jerry #mixed

In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other. ↗

— J. M. Coetzee

#cruel #hearts #order #other #our

Group conformity scares the pants off me because it's so often a prelude to cruelty towards anyone who doesn't want to - or can't - join the Big Parade. ↗

— Bette Midler

#because #big #conformity #cruelty #group

Family responsibility, yes, and always. Family bankruptcy due to the cruel rules of government, no. ↗

— Barbara Mikulski

#bankruptcy #cruel #due #family #government

I see that the path of progress has never taken a straight line, but has always been a zigzag course amid the conflicting forces of right and wrong, truth and error, justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy. ↗

— Kelly Miller

#amid #been #conflicting #course #cruelty

With the first act of cruelty committed in the name of revolution, with the first murder, with the first purge and execution, we have lost the revolution. ↗

— Kate Millett

#committed #cruelty #execution #first #lost

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#cruelty #music #oppression #simple #soft

A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run. ↗

— Ouida

#every #hand #oils #run #runs