Quotes About Experience

Jacqueline Wilson

I felt tears pricking inside my eyelids. Maybe I came first with Oliver

With a true masterpiece, there are no words required. Discourse is rendered redundant. That's why the work of a master transcends all notions of education, of class. It rises above the onlooker's understanding of what is considered good or bad, or right or wrong in the world of art. With the artist who has achieved mastery, skill, experience and knowledge are transparent, leaving only the message for all to see.

The heart does not know chronos time, Maisie.

What interests me is the experience of ordinary people. To tell you the truth, although I can repeat certain dates, statistics, and so on, what I am really curious about is what happens to ordinary men, women, and children in extraordinary times.

And perhaps you can stay longer next time. I sometimes miss the debate my students challenged me with when they stopped being scared of me and before they were mature enough to realize that those who are older may know something after all.

Tragedy is so personal, but it doesn't mean it hasn't happened before, to someone, somewhere—it's what helps us to understand and bring solace to others, knowing something of what they feel.

Those of us who have reached our more mature years know the value of a nap, Maisie, and we can indulge ourselves without the comfort of pillow or bed.

Never fear going in circles, Maisie. The next time around, you'll see something you missed before—that's if your mind is open. And you will be different, and it will be better. Experience, Maisie. Knowledge of yourself. And when you have knowledge, you have wisdom. If your mind is open, and your heart is willing.

Standing alongside a harp, she stretched out her hand and ran her fingers across the strings, the tumble of notes reminding her of a shower on a bright day, of primrose petals bending to the weight of raindrops. She regretted never having learned to play an instrument.

It could be argued that we leave everything most loved with each new experience that demands we grow.

With the hindsight of the worldly experience she had since acquired, it was clear to Maisie that Dame Constance had suffered fools, if not gladly, then with gracious ease.

We are all apprentices, Maisie. Even when we think we've graduated to another rung on the ladder of experience, there is always much to learn. Every soul who comes to me for counsel gives me another lesson in return, and I am humbled and made new by each fresh opportunity to serve.

but remember that each day you are weaving a memory. Make sure you don't look back at these times through a veil of tears.

Sometimes the worries of the world give one pause for thought, and one wonders—especially someone of my antiquity—why history is not a more efficient teacher.

What is certain, is that war will not leave us as it found us. —WOMAN AT HOME, February 1915

They say the face tells all there is to know about a life, but I personally believe much can be deduced from the hands. There are lines and scars, bumps and calluses; indeed, the hands are both the sketch and the final work of art.

Memories come out of nowhere, sometimes, don't they? Like a splinter long in the finger finally rises to the surface. Pluck it out, and the pain goes—and you realize there has been discomfort all along, but you have lived with it.

I know now that what is tragic isn't the moment. It is the memory.

Somewhere in my brain each laugh, tear and lullaby becomes memory .

Some evenings I don't know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Feels like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.

It was that palpable sense of presence shoved up against the reality of absence, like hot against cold, that really threatened to buckle the whole mass.

If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real.

If we are bound and determined to speak in terms of reference, nuclear war is the only possible referent of any discourse and any experience that would share their condition with that of literature. If, according to a structuring hypothesis, a fantasy or phantasm, nuclear war is equivalent to the total destruction of the archive, if not of the human habitat, it becomes the absolute referent, the horizon and the condition of all the others.