Quotes About Experience

No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more.

Some men explained why men explaining things to women wasn't really a gendered phenomenon. Usually, women pointed out that, in insisting on their right to dismiss the experiences women say they have, men succeeded in explaining in just the way I said they sometimes do.

So much of feminism has been women speaking up about hitherto unacknowledged experiences, and so much of antifeminism has been men telling them these things didn't happen. You were not just raped, your rapist may say, and then if you persist there may be death threats, because killing people is the easy way to be the only voice in the room.

Heartbreak is a little like falling in love, in the way it charges everything with a kind of incandescence, as though the beloved has stepped away and your gaze now rests with all the same intensity on all the items of the view that close-up person blocked.

Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.

B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears.

As Nancy Frey writes of the long-distance pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, 'When pilgrims begin to walk several things usually begin to happen to their perceptions of the world which continue over the course of the journey: they develop a changing sense of time, a heightening of the senses, and a new awareness of their bodies and the landscape....A young German man expressed it this way: 'In the experience of walking, each step is a thought. You can't escape yourself.

A person in her twenties has been a child for most of her life, but as time goes by that portion that is childhood becomes smaller and smaller, more and more distant, more and more faded, though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world and were going back into the darkness from which you came.

Stories like yours and worse than yours are all around, and your suffering won't mark you out as special, though your response to it might.

Disaster movies and the media continue to portray ordinary people as hysterical or vicious in the face of calamity. We believe these sources telling us we are victims or brutes more than we trust our own experience

The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.

If you walk a city, if you love a city, if you put in your miles and years with open heart and mind, the city will reveal itself to you. Maybe it won't become yours, but you will become its - its chronicler, its pilgrim, its ardent lover, its nonnative son or native daughter or defender.

a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane.

If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's feet is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not.

When I first began to write, I had been a child for most of my life, and my childhood memories were vivid and potent, and the forces that shaped me, Most of them have grown fainter with time, and whenever I write one down, I give it away: it ceases to have the shadowy life of memory and becomes fixed in letters: it ceases to be mine; it loses that mobile unreliability of the live.

Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another forty-something years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I'm not holding my breath.

It's the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value.

Memory of joy and liberation can become a navigational tool, an identity, a gift.

Adulthood is made up of a prudent anticipation and a philosophical memory that make you navigate more slowly and steadily.

Woolf disagrees, saying of the home, "For there we sit surrounded by objects which enforce the memories of our own experience.

In opening that essay, she wrote, "The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical…." Later in the essay, she adds, "Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactive, stifling. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish.

Everyone is influenced by those things that precede formal education, that come out of the blue and out of everyday life.

During those years at the end of my teens and the beginning of my twenties, I was constantly sexually harassed on the street and sometimes elsewhere. The harassed doesn't convey the menace that was often present.

No perderte nunca es no vivir