Quotes About Experience

You love the life you've lived, you're an American girl. You believe you have chosen it.

A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons—Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy. Josiah

You can think of your life as the mistakes you made that catch up with you finally.

If this was a flirtation — and it felt like a flirtation — it was like no other flirtation in Katya's experience: with a man old enough to be her grandfather?

You love the life you've lived, there is no other. You love the life you've lived, you're an American girl. You believe you have chosen it.

Living's immediacy, you go full sail, you're in a fever of motion. Until it's safe and past and done and dead and you can say, like waking from a dream, Yes I was happy then, yes now it's all over I can see I was happy then. Maybe that's the advantage of dying?

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul." —

grip of Paradox. A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons—Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy.

A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons—Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy.

She wanted a relationship that seemed already mature, if not old and settled, at the start. Newness and rawness did not appeal to her.

he'd come to earth. Hard.

happened to you! what happened

You don't have to understand why anything that has happened to you has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains. A

F]or, living our lives, as our bodies live for us, we are not at all clockwork; we do not feel ourselves to be clockwork; each second is new to us, quicksilver and unexpected, undefined.

My crappy-kid's life. It was mostly a shitty life wasn't it, OK but I miss it.

Oh, it's a terrible, cruel thing—first you're young, and that takes up such a long time you think it's forever, then suddenly you're not young, and you never get used to it—and, oh dear, there's just the one way out." ? Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys

A life consists of many facts, implacable facts, you do not want to know.

For Iris has learned that to experience a thing is not to know it, or even to have the power to remember it coherently.

Yet I remember little. Or nothing. A chloroformed handkerchief, perhaps; a stinging & burning sensation afterward, when required to make water—(as Nanny called it); ah, is it not distasteful, ugly—& too trifling to be recalled.)

The proposition is: Flesh has memory. The proposition is: Flesh has memory but is perpetually innocent. Even in ripening, even in rot.

La memoria a veces resulta confusa, esa es la cuestión. Si la memoria no fuera confusa no poseerías el valor del necio de repetir una y otra vez cosas que te destrozan.

Of my own experience at Princeton as a graduate, with honors, of the Class of 1927, I will not speak: except to say that it was instructive, and illuminating; and if I had to repeat it again, I would hang myself.

Like a memory of having been poisoned by something you'd eaten, barely managed to survive—and yet here is the food again, and you are hungry.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily,often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul-- Joyce Carole Oates