Quotes About Experience

Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.

The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

I never make a trip to the United States without visiting a supermarket. To me they are more fascinating than any fashion salon.

Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.

This was what could happen to you: you could end up this far from where you thought you were going.

I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love.

Here is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way. I bet she's had a very sad life.

Dad went to Canada to learn how to fly with the Royal Canadian Air Force. He took me on my first airplane ride, where I could have a hand on the stick.

Human language is too poor to express the real nature of the Absolute Truth or Ultimate Reality which is Nirvana. Language is created and used by masses of human beings to express things and ideas experienced by their sense organs and their mind. A supramundane experience like that of the Absolute Truth is not of such a category. Therefore there cannot be words to express that experience, just as the fish had no words in his vocabulary to express the nature of the solid land.

I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there.

The Real War Will Never Get in the Books. And so good-bye to the war.

So here I sit in the early candle-light of old age—I and my book—casting backward glances over our travel'd road.

There was a child went forth every day,And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became.

The horizon's edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud,These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.

Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.

Life is a school of probability.

There's no short or easy way to describe my poet laureate experience except to say I was quite surprised at the high demand for the poet laureate. I probably average an event per week at many expected and odd venues across the state, e.g., as grand marshal of a small town fall parade. Yes, poetry is alive but not always in ways that can be predicted.

Every place that I have lived haunts me. I always feel like I was never attentive enough and that I missed something, when in reality it's so much more, I missed volumes.

Because he never raises his eyes to the great and the meaningful, the philistine has taken experience as his gospel. It has become for him a message about life's commonness. But he has never grasped that there exists something other than experience, that there are values--inexperienceable--which we serve.

Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.

How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!

The work of memory collapses time.