Quotes About Experience

Perhaps there was no real point to our existence–or none that we could discern–and that meant that the real question that had to be asked was this: How can I make my life bearable? We are here whether we like it or not, and by and large we seem to have a need to continue. In that case, the real question to be addressed is: How are we going to make the experience of being here as fulfilling, as good as possible? That

Mushroom people are fond of saying, 'There are old mycologists and there are bold mycologists, but there are no old, bold mycologists.' 

We all have Proustian moments, but don't really know about it until we read Proust.

There are roads to Damascus, she told herself. People travel on them.

There's a poem about onions," she said. "It's about how memory is like an onion—it makes you cry.

We don't forget...Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, smells of places, of little things that happened to us and which come back, unexpectedly, to remind us of who we are.

I have the luxury, I suppose, of being self-employed. But I know what it's like to apply for jobs.

Men talked about things that happened in the world, about events; women, by contrast, talked amongst themselves about being in the world. The difference was crucial.

Perhaps there was no real point to our existence–or none that we could discern–and that meant that the real question that had to be asked was this: How can I make my life bearable? We are here whether we like it or not, and by and large we seem to have a need to continue. In that case, the real question to be addressed is: How are we going to make the experience of being here as fulfilling, as good as possible?

And the memory made her humble; for we should not forget what it is to be young and to have ideas and attitudes that may later seem so fanciful.

The voices of the children were pure; their hearts were pure. Some of them had already discovered how hard life could be; others had yet to do so and probably did not fully understand what the world could be.

all of us had a view from somewhere, a view of the world from the perspective of who we were, of what had happened to us, of how we thought about things.

Love and loss—two things that went together, it seemed, with a poignant inevitability; we loved, knowing that we would lose, but loved nonetheless because...She stopped. Yes, because we did not choose to love; we loved because we had to. Love was something that happened to us; it was never planned, even if we knew that some day, at some moment, it might alight upon us and—we hoped—change everything.

But then one thing you did learn with the passage of time was not to ask too many questions. That was the difference, she decided, between being twenty and being forty. That, and other things, of course.

A life without moments of unhappiness would be monotonous, I would have thought.

That at least was a consolation: separation and loss were something that we all experienced; the pain was shared, and was perhaps easier for that.

Invisibility to the young of course is a quality that grows slowly: by thirty one is beginning to get fainter, by forty one is starting to disappear, by fifty the metaphorical hill has been crossed and one is simply no longer ther.

Sometimes I go blind. Then I take my right hand out to dinner.

He who has lived and thought can never Help in his soul despising men, He who has felt will be forever Haunted by days he can't regain. For him there are no more enchantments, Him does the serpent of remembrance, Him does repentance always gnaw. All this will frequently afford A great delight to conversations.

They say that misfortune is a good school. Yes, true. But happiness is the best university.

fruto de mis años, marchitos antes de florecer (a Piotr Aleksandrovich Pletnev)

You haven't lived until you died in New York.

Apple is not in the computer business. Apple is in the empowerment business. Nike is not in the sneakers business. It is in the personal goals business. Heineken is not in the beer business. It is in the party business. Forgetting

Time was the first thing I noticed about the United States.