Time & Perspective Quote by George Saunders

Character, in Saunders's hands, isn't a résumé of virtues or a brand you curate; it's the residue of your baffling minutes. "Sum total" sounds clinical, almost accounting-like, but what he's tallying are the unaccountable: the impulsive kindness you later can't justify, the cowardice that surprises you, the sudden choice that doesn't fit your self-myth. The line refuses the comforting idea that character is a stable core you can name and polish. It's an accumulation of lived glitches.

The kicker is "we can't explain". Explanation is where we launder ourselves, turning messy motives into clean narratives: I did it because I'm loyal, principled, strategic. Saunders, a writer obsessed with moral friction, points to the moments that resist that laundering. They aren't explainable because they're crowded with mixed incentives, social pressure, fear, tenderness, habit, ego - the whole swarm of being human. By elevating the inexplicable, he undercuts the culture of hot takes about people as knowable types, and the self-help industry that sells character as a set of repeatable hacks.

Context matters: Saunders's fiction often stages ordinary people caught in systems that encourage small cruelties and small evasions, then asks what it costs to wake up inside them. This quote reads like a craft note and a moral claim at once. For storytelling, the unexplainable moment is where a character becomes real. For life, it's where your identity is decided before your brain can spin it into a story you like.