Quotes About Experience

Everybody had something horrible happen to them at one time or another in their life; it was part of the human condition. How they struggled through adversity proved what kind of people they were.

You sowed enough wild oats before we were married to qualify for farm subsidies.

Time turns from a straight line into a sphere and it's not until later that you can hold it in your hand and look at all the different sides, and you think, Oh, now I remember --- this happened, then this happened, then... It's only after the fact that you can pull back into a straight line that makes sense

A person who has been up close when a gun is fired into another human being never mistakes the sound of a gunshot for something else.

I had experienced a TIA, which of course further infuriated your mother (she has always been hostile to abbreviation).

but the emergency room was a young person's game, the sort of place you ran screaming from before you hit your thirties.

Everybody thought that history was like a book with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That's not how it worked. Real life was all middle.

Sweetheart, I know you're an adult, but adults are like vampires. The older ones are much more powerful." Claire

Paul. She hadn't just watched him die. She had taken in his death like a hummingbird drawing nectar.

closer she got to forty, the more annoyed she was by people in their twenties.

Well." Lydia took a deep breath as she prepared to sing the hokey pokey of her life story, where she put the truth in, pulled a lie out, added an embellishment, and shook it all about.

L'homme ne prend conscience de son être que dans les situations limites. [Autobiographie philosophique (1963)]

I like today and perhaps a little future still, but the past is really something I'm not interested in. So, as far as I'm concerned, I like only the past of things and people I don't know. When I know, I don't care because I knew how it was.

I buy my shoes a size too small. I like the way it feels.

Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness

There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.

had a wee in the Amazon. Until Richard told me I should be careful because there are some tiny fish that can swim up from the water through my urine and into my knob! Is that how amazing the Amazon is? The fish in there would really rather live in my knob than the river.

I had a coconut on the way, which was another first for me. A drink and food all in one. It didn't look like the normal coconuts you win at fairgrounds. There was no hair on it. I don't know if that's how they grow here or if it's that Brazilians hate hair on anything and they've waxed them.

The only memory I have was how the wrestler's balls that were thrust into my face left a saltiness on my lips.

a man be wise it is no shame for him to live and learn.' Sophocles.

Memories leave a light in the eyes, just as plain as scars.

Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.

In the end we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see that it matters how we get there. It seemed to Ursula that how you got there was the whole point.

When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.