Quotes About Experience

And I served as an officer in the army." "Very impressive. I've been told that war is boredom interspersed with violence and terror.

but the pain was old to him, and somehow it had become a part of him. He could bear it and speak of it. It had shaped him; he had accomodated it. He had loved abd he had lost and it had made him who he was.

Do the girls emerge quite ruined for marriage after you stuff them full of knowledge? I should imagine most of our girls emerge less tolerant of fools, if that's what you mean. - Dryden and Phoebe

It's what this night would feel like if I could seize hold of it

He was older, bolder. He knew of whores and wars, violence and vendettas. He knew precisely what he wanted, always. He wanted her.

How he felt (hard as a wall, safe as a house, dangerous as a wild animal), how he smelled (sweat, sawdust, smoke, musk, sex), how he tasted (like sin, if sin was a liqueur)- taken together they should have all comprised an adventure. And then a lesson. And then be rapidly consigned to history.

Time took on a peculiarly viscous quality.

What can happen in a few minutes changes you forever.

Going to university is only one avenue to gain knowledge. There are others. A degree isn't insurance against ignorance.

The first time she slit a man's throat she felt sick to her stomach. The second time? Not so much.

It was a damned awkward undertaking, trying to think of loving words, and he had absolutely no experience in this area, but he was still determined not to muck it up. Even with his men watching, he wanted the words to be right, his declaration to be one she would always remember. The moment needed to be perfect for her. Judith, he began. Yes, Iain? I'm keeping you.

You don't remember what you said to me when I was inside you? She frowned with concentration while she thought about it. Hurry up?

I remember being called a pig. You do? You know good and well, I do. I was called a pig in two languages. You were? I was.

The young fought sleep, she thought, but the old relished it, and at the moment, she felt absolutely ancient.

There are moments when the filament of time bends, loops, blurs. The present becomes permeable; the past leaps forward and insists itself upon us without warning. The orderly progression of our days reveals itself to be a lie, and the sense making brain flounders. What was he supposed to call this impossibility that insisted itself before him as reality? A hallucination? Deja vu, that cheap cinematic trick of the mind?

The thing you learn with Potage Parmentier is that simple is not exactly the same as easy.

The crunch of the mustard-spiked crust somehow brings the unctuous smooth richness of the liver into sharp relief. It's like the silky soul of steak. You have to close your eyes, let the meat melt on your tongue, into your corpuscles.

When Hans asks for more volunteers, half a dozen people step eagerly forward, but I am not one of them. I tell myself it's because I should let the tuition-paying students, those who are here legitimately, get the experience, but the truth is that somewhere deep inside I don't want to be a party to this slaughter, that I feel somehow less culpable as an observer than as a participant. Nonsense, of course.

It's been years, and yet she still talks about my first New York studio like it was the hole in a Khmer Rouge prison.

To me, a recently read novel was like a miniature planet: only a few hours earlier I had been breathing its air and living contentedly among its people - and now I was expected to pronounce a judgement about its worth?

I had just wanted to be part of a story; I wanted to be a person who had a story to tell.

We naturally look for evidence that confirms our beliefs. We then experience what we believe, even when there is evidence to suggest otherwise.

What came next is very hard to tell. Indeed, I have told it but once before, when I needed to, and I will tell it this time only becaude it forms a strand in the fabric of my story, and it wove itself into what came after.

There is learning in everything