Quotes About Experience

We are the movies and the movies are us.

Again he thought of his own losses, and he wondered why it was that the things a person had lost— or might lose— defined him more than the things he yet possessed.

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

I'm not getting old," Harry said, "I'm already old.

Apparently when Australian Aboriginal males reach adolescence, they are left in the outback for up to six months to fend for themselves. Forced to survive on their own wits. It is a rite of passage. The same was true for Peter. He needed to survive two months in the outback of the United States. Prove that he could survive cut off in the field.

he was inadequately trained for the cut and thrust savagery of the average American teen.

Nothing, however, lasts forever. Two weeks can seem like a lifetime when you are just beginning it, but the last day always seems to have come too quickly. It was finally time to head back to the real world,

walked to the door. "You know, you don't have to show me the way. I done this enough times now, I know how to get there." "Yeah, probably," the guard said. "They just like us to walk along with you, make sure you don't get lost along the way. Besides, I've got money on you tonight. You're not gonna disappoint me, are you?

All of life's great lessons present themselves again and again until mastered.

No one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experiened".

Insanity is applying a singular dimensional answer to a multi dimensional experience.

I said that certain West Coast jazz was like "wet dream music." That's a great line, isn't it? You knew something happened when you woke up but you got no satisfaction!

Freedom goes with suffering. Truth, wisdom, and knowledge of reality go with suffering.

Nothing touches the soul but leaves its impress, and thus, little by little, we are fashioned into the image of all we have seen and heard, known and meditated; and if we learn to live with all that is fairest and purest and best , the love of it all will in the end become our life.

Jews, therefore, as far as progressives are concerned, don't represent anything outside of themselves. No victory is claimed by championing their experience, and this leads to a subtle—and unconscious—exclusion.

Just as a particular racism can only really be defined by the victims of that racism, the deep truth of identity is only available to those who live that identity. Casting a non-minority actor to mimic that identity feels, to the progressive eye, like impersonation, and impersonation carries with it an element of mockery: or at least, it is reductive, lessening the complexity of that experience by channeling it through an actor who hasn't lived it.*

It's my experience that most folk who ride trains could care less where they're going. For them it's the journey itself and the people they meet along the way. You see, at every stop this train makes, a little bit of America, a little bit of your country, gets on and says hello.

It's not getting from A to B. It's not the beginning or the destination that counts. It's the ride in between...This train is alive with things that should be seen and heard. It's a living, breathing something -- you just have to want to learn its rhythm.

It's not the beginning or the destination that counts. It's the ride in between.

We cannot live without memories, but we cannot live within them either.

Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgement difficult. — Hippocrates (460-400 B.C.)

To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork. The viewers' concerns are not your concerns (although it's dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is whatever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to make a killing off it, whatever. Your job is to learn to work on your work.

To see things is to enhance your sense of wonder both for the singular pattern of your own experience, and for the meta-patterns that shape all experience.

It is not only the ratio of pleasure to pain that determines the quality of a life, but also the sheer quantity of pain. Once a certain threshold of pain is passed, no amount of pleasure can compensate for it.