Quotes About Experience

A visit to the cinema is no longer that: it is less, a tarnished thing, an alloyed pleasure.

It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it.

I realised,' she said, 'that she was happy for the first time in her life, and I realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did.

I have this theory that most artists never leave childhood, that you're endlessly trying to work out what happened. And leaving university and facing this idea that there is something called adult life that I was going to enter and get a job – I just couldn't. So writing became what I did as soon as I stopped studying.

literature has long since discovered and documented this place of which I thought myself to be the first inhabitant,…

Some people write simply because they don't know how to live in the moment, I said, and have to reconstruct itand live in it afterwards.

such strange, violent impulses were coming over me, one after another. I wanted to lie down and hammer my fists on the grass- I wanted to experience a complete loss of control.

Change is also loss

This feeling, of being negated at the same time as I was exposed, had had a particularly powerful effect on me, I said.

sea lo que sea lo que queramos pensar de nosotros mismos, no somos sino el resultado del trato que hemos recibido por parte de los demás.

realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did.

I realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did.

It [beauty] had always felt like something I might find, or something I had temporarily lost, or something I was pursuing.

Let's just say that drama became something very real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out on the wold. In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her. I said it seemed to me that at a certain point a lot of people felt that, not about work but about life itself.

It was nearly thirty years since his first marriage ended, and the further he got from that life, the more real it became to him. Or not real exactly, he said – what had happened since had been real enough. The word he was looking for was authentic: his first marriage had been authentic in a way that nothing ever had again. The older he got, the more it represented to him a kind of home, a place to which he yearned to return.

Yet the illusion of meaning recurred, much as you tried to resist it: like childhood, I said, which we treat as an explanatory text rather than merely as a formative experience of powerlessness.

he was observing something while I, evidently, was entirely immersed in being it.

Do you want the long answer or the short?" is the customary divide between explanations versus outcomes in the retelling of events. Ferrante gives us both the long answer and the short, and in doing so adumbrates the mysterious beauty and brutality of personal experience.

and his wonder at the marks experience has left on her woman's body.

I believe there are certain moments in life that don't obey the laws of time and instead last forever, and this was one of them: I am living it still, Jeffers!

so for most people the act of reading symbolised intelligence, quite possibly because in that formative time they had not enjoyed or understood the books that they were obliged to read.

t's suggested that the ultimate fulfillment of a conscious being lay not in solitude but in a shared state so intricate and corporative it might almost be said to represent the entwining of two selves. This notion, of the unitary self being broken down, consciousness not as an imprisonment in one's own perceptions but rather as something more intimate and less divided, or universality that could come from shared experience at the highest level.

He had grown more animated while he spoke, and his desperate, wild-eyed demeanour had softened into the genial mask of the raconteur. I had the impression that these were stories he had told before and liked to tell, as though he had discovered the power and pleasure of reliving events with their sting removed. The skill, I saw, lay in skirting close enough to what appeared to be the truth without allowing what you actually felt about it to regain its power over you.

The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again.