Quotes About Experience

School curriculum, learning activities--all educational pursuits--should be characterized by and should lead to a sense and experience of wholeness. (p25)

Writing about sex is not as personally revealing as one might think, because like anything else you write about, the words are not the deed. I have not done those words, I have done and felt private things for which words such as "sex" and "lust" are only poor apologies.

It is better to have bounced and bumped than never to have bounced at all.

Veni, vidi, flevi. I came. I saw. I cried.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake, ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs window. (from "Antilamentation")

Middle age is youth without levity, and age without decay.

Though [Abraham Lincoln] never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare's kings to Merry England; he went with Lord Byron poetry to Spain and Portugal. Literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings.

An adult friend of Lincoln's: "Life was to him a school.

All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in 70 or 80 years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all.

As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

I'm learning something all the time. That's the way I want it to go, and that's the way I'll go until I am no longer on this planet.

What he didn't know was that he always would and that in all those important moments that were yet to come to pass in his life, there would be a searing wound. Over time the wound would grow smaller, but it would never disappear.

Life is a struggle, I would tell him. Some days are better than others, and every person's life is bittersweet, filled with joy and pain.

because a book lets your imagination soar and a movie makes all the decisions for you. A book is almost always, but not always, a far richer experience than a book turned into a movie.

You can write about anything which has been vivid enough to cause you to comment upon it." If a situation has caught your attention to that extent, it has meaning for you, and if you can find what that meaning is, you have the basis for a story.

It is well to understand as early as possible in one's writing life that there is just one contribution which every one of us can make: we can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us

there is just one contribution which every one of us can make: we can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you made.

Wenn man geboren wird, muss man leben.