Quotes About Experience

When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.

I know. You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by.

Old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft.

When I look back now, I realize what a trial I must have been to my friends and relatives. It was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another. I was always yelling and running somewhere, because I was afraid life was going to be over that very afternoon.

If you need to find out the kindling point of paper (451° F), don't call an academic, call the fire department.

It is in the totality of experience reckoned with, filed, and forgotten, that each man is truly different from all others in the world.

Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young. She

The good writers touch life often.

A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head.

The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.

Life should be touched, not strangled.

Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul.

Nearby, an old man was similarly engaged in finding the pattern of his life in the depths of his glass.

They sat on the edge of a brook and took off their shoes and let the water cut their feet off to the ankles with an exquisite cold razor.

We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks...And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me.

This will be the one trip of your life. Keep your eyes wide.

It is the privilege of old people to seem to know everything. But it's an act and a mask, like every other act and mask. Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and smile, saying, How do you like my mask, my act, my certainty? Isn't life a play? Don't I play it well?

Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.

Listen. Easy now, said the old man gently. I know, I know. You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.

This summer night deep down under the stars was all the things you would ever feel or see or hear in your life, drowning you all at once.

I don't want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?

Thomas Wolfe ate the world and vomited lava. Dickens dined at a different table every hour of his life. Molière, tasting society, turned to pick up his scalpel, as did Pope and Shaw.

If anything is taught here, it is simply the charting of the life of someone who started out to somewhere—and went.

When you strip all the clothes away and the doodads, you have two human beings who were either happy or unhappy