Quotes About Experience

There had been addition—and subtraction—in my life, but how much multiplication?

Yes it was, but as I said, it depended on where—and who—you were. If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: 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.

For most of us, the first experience of love, even if it doesn't work out—perhaps especially when it doesn't work out—promises that here is the thing that validates, that vindicates life. And though subsequent years might alter this view, until some of us give up on it altogether, when love first strikes, there's nothing like it, is there? Agreed?

La vida no es sólo una suma y una resta. Es también la acumulación, la multiplicación de pérdidas, de fracasos.

Most of us have only one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine. Perhaps this is an illusion all lovers have about themselves: that they escape both category and description.

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This

It is only a metaphor—or the worst of dreams; yet there are metaphors which sit more powerfully in the brain than remembered events.

Julian Barnes

he certainly never regretted his love for Susan. What he did regret was that he had been too young, too ignorant, too absolutist, too confident of what he imagined love's nature and workings to be.

But time Ã¢â'¬Â¦ how time first grounds us and then confounds us.

Tai ir yra gyvenimas, ar ne? Šiek tiek pasiekim? ir šiek tiek nusivylim?.

She has only a ghostplay on some frayed screen of memory, which she takes to be the present.

We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young.

He survived to tell the tale"—that's what people say, don't they? 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.

La verdad no es amable. Lo descubrirás muy pronto cuando la vida te vapulee.

How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so?

De haber vivido, ¿habría disfrutado de la vida, como la mayoría hacemos o intentamos hacer? Quizá; o tal vez habría albergado culpa y remordimiento por no haber sabido acoplar sus actos con sus argumentos.

Es menos el recuerdo de un suceso que el recuerdo de una fotografía del suceso. Y hoy día, como hemos perdido altura, precisión, foco, ya no confiamos tanto en la fotografía como en otra época. Las viejas instantáneas de tiempos más felices parecen haberse vuelto menos primarias, menos fotografías de la vida misma y más fotografías de fotografías. O, dicho de otro modo, tu recuerdo de tu vida —tu vida anterior

Happiness is like the pox. Catch it too soon, and it wrecks your constitution

And so, wisely no doubt, I left philosophy to my brother, and returned to literature, which did, and still does, tell us best what the world consists of. It can also tell us how best to live in that world, thought it does so most effectively when appearing not to do so.

How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted?

Y lo mismo ocurre con nuestra vida: tan clara, tan segura, hasta que por una razón u otra —el globo se mueve, la nube se dispersa, el sol cambia de ángulo— la imagen se pierde para siempre, se torna accesible sólo al recuerdo, se convierte en anécdota.

Sometimes the past may be a greased pig; sometimes a bear in its den; and sometimes merely the flash of a parrot, two mocking eyes that spark at you from the forest.

Istorija n?ra nugal?toj? melai <...>, tai veikiau išgyvenusi?j? prisiminimai, ir dauguma j? n?ra nei nugal?tojai, nei pralaim?jusieji.