Quotes About Experience

Life is one long experiment in learning. Who can be perfect all the time? Sometimes I feel half-wise, sometimes half-stupid.

With all its ups and downs, skipping is just one more metaphor for life.

We write to remember our nows later.

Adversity enhances this tale we call life.

No matter how nice the place is where you live, you need to experience life and the world.

A few days earlier, as Steve stepped off a dinghy, his boot had gotten tangled in a rope. "Watch out for that rope," I said. He shot me a look that said, I've just caught forty-nine crocodiles in three weeks, and you're thinking I'm going to fall over a rope? I laughed sheepishly. It seemed absurd to caution Steve about being careful.

We had arrived at a remarkable place in our relationship. Our trip to Lakefield had been one of the most special months of my entire life. The kids had a great time. We were all in the same place together, not only physically, but emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. We were all there.

He skied Mount Bachelor. I wasn't much of a skier, so I went off to track down wildlife while he had a great time on the slopes. Meeting him at the lodge afterward, I had to head off a leggy blonde who was intent on teaching Steve how to use an American pay phone. Not the kind of wildlife I was interested in him experiencing.

I had learned so much about marriage from Missy that I only had to get divorced two more times.

We live in a world in which there is nothing that cannot be narrated, but nothing that needs to be either.

Knowledge is a destination. Truth, the journey.

Craft goes only so far in explaining how an artist uses his gift, and the gift itself is often inexplicable. Autobiography provides an alternate route—a seeming detour that may ultimately tell us something about an artist's sensibility and the experiences that shaped it.

First loves seldom end up being last loves,

Back then I confused passions and orgasms with love. It look me years to realize the two weren't synonymous.

I like to think of what happens to characters in good novels and stories as knots--things keep knotting up. And by the end of the story--readers see an unknotting of sorts. Not what you expect, not the easy answers you get on TV, not wash and wear philosophies, but a reproduction of believable, emotional experiences.

Everything that ever happened is just stories now, Earl. But it was all very real to people while it was happening. Wasn't it?

I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.

The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.

It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.

Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.

This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.

These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.

A big seizure just kind of grabs the inside of your skull and squeezes. It feels as if it's twisting and turning your brain all up and down and inside out. Have you ever heard a washing machine suddenly flip into that bang-bang-bang sound when it gets out of balance, or a chain saw when the chain breaks and gets caught up in the gears, or an animal like a cat, screeching in pain? Those are what seizures felt like when I was little.

In daylight we pick up our tinned rations and hike off, every artery and nerve of us, into the rest of our commemorative lives.