Quotes About Experience

I suppose the truth is that, yes, I'm not odd enough not to have done the things I've ended up doing with my life.

He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.

Once bitten, twice shy; twice bitten, forever shy.

Insofar as I liked doing things by myself, it was partly for the pleasure of telling her about them afterwards.

I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments.

It seemed such a brief while ago that they were all laughing at Professor Nikolayev's definition of a musicologist. Imagine we are eating scrambled eggs, the Professor used to say. My cook, Pasha, has prepared them, and you and I are eating them. Along comes a man who has not prepared them and is not eating them, but he talks about them as if he knows everything about them - that is a musicologist.

And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses.

Well, getting our history wrong is part of being a person.

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This was the question Adrian's fragment set off in me. There had been addition—and subtraction—in my life, but how much multiplication? And this gave me a sense of unease, of unrest.

Isn't growing up a necessary process of losing one's innocence? Maybe, maybe not. But the trouble with life is, you rarely know when that loss is going to happen, do you? And how it will be, afterwards.

what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience.

most people didn't experience "the sixties" until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties—or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.

I had a friend who trained as a lawyer, then became disenchanted and never practiced. He told me that the one benefit of those wasted years was that he no longer feared either the law or lawyers.

You like this stuff?' she asked neutrally. 'Good to dance to,' I replied, a little defensively. 'Do you dance to it? Here? In your room? By yourself?' 'No, not really.' Though of course I did.

My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I'd been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been.

Naquele tempo imaginávamo-nos fechados numa espécie de redil, à espera que nos soltassem para a vida. E, quando o momento chegasse, as nossas vidas - e o próprio tempo - acelarariam. Como podíamos saber que, de qualquer modo, as nossas vidas já haviam começado, que já levávamos vantagem, que algum dano já fora inflingido?

If you're an old geezer in his rocker on the porch, you don't play basketball with the kids. Old geezers don't jump. You sit and make a virtue of what you have. And what you do is this: you make the kids think that anyone, anyone can jump, but it takes a wise old buzzard to know how to sit there and rock.

My reading might be pointless in terms of the history of literary criticism; but it's not pointless in terms of pleasure.

History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.

You find yourself repeating, They grow up so quickly, don't they? when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.

everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn't make it any the less real. And it was the only story

The relationship between professional and domestic cook has similarities to a sexual encounter. One party is normally more experienced than the other; and either party should have the right, at any moment, to say, No, I'm not going to do that.

The answers hardly seemed of consequence. Not much did. I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.