Quotes About Experience

To prevent your persona from becoming a prison you must experience your inner self stripped of its outer trappings.

What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across—each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip—is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale.

When I read a book, I try my best, not always successfully, to let the wall crumble just a bit, the barricade that separates me from the book. I try to be involved. I am Raskalnikov. I am K. I am Humbert and Lolita. I am you. If you read these pages and think I'm the way I am because I lived through a civil war, you can't feel my pain. If you believe you're not like me because one woman, and only one, Hannah, chose to be my friend, then you're unable to empathize.

By remaining constrained in one's environment or country or family, one has little chance of being other than the original prescription. By leaving, one gains a perspective, a distance of both space and time, which is essential for writing about family or home, in any case.

Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass—an hourglass that drains grain by grain.

Childhood is played out in a foreign language and our memory of it is a Constance Garnett translation.

The receding perspective of my past smothers my present. Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

No matter how good a story is, there is more at stake in the telling.

I'd dismembered it in my memories. I'd disremembered it.

My features have blunted with the passage of time, my reflection only faintly resembles how I see myself. Gravity demands payback for the years my body has resisted it.

I am a reader. Yes, I am that, a reader with nagging back pain.

It's just that our memories are rarely where we think they are.

Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass—an hourglass that drains grain by grain. Literature gives me life, and life kills me. Well, life kills everyone.

I realised when it came to men, I did not pick the beautiful or the correct. I picked the wrong one.

When I read a book, I try my best, not always successfully, to let the wall crumble just a bit, the barricade that separates me from the book. I try to be involved.

I am Raskolnikov. I am K. I am Humbert and Lolita. I am you. If you read these pages and think I'm the way I am because I lived through a civil war, you can't feel my pain. If you believe you're not like me because one woman, and only one, Hannah, chose to be my friend, then you're unable to empathize. Like the bullet, I too stray. Forgive me.

Other people are hazy phenomena that become corporeal only in my memories.

Anna Karenina was the first time I allowed a book and its world into my house.

Uncle Jihad used to say that what happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of those events affect us. My father and I may have shared numerous experiences, but, as I was constantly finding out, we rarely shared their stories; we din't know how to listen to one another.

Her appearance has changed as well, and I don't mean just the intense reticulation of lines and wrinkles, the true stigmata of life.

I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.

In the early pages of his gorgeous novel Sepharad, Antonio Munoz Molina writes: "Only those of us who have left know what the city used to be like and are aware of how much it has changed; it's the people who stayed who can't remember, who seeing it day after day have been losing that memory, allowing it to be distorted, although they think they're the one who remained faithful, and that we, in a sense, are deserters.

Gray hairs are signs of wisdom if you hold your tongue, speak and they are but hairs, as in the young.