Quotes About Experience

He remembered Barber when he was gentle and when he was not; his tender pleasure at preparing and sharing food, and his selfishness; his patience in instruction, and his cruelty; his raunchiness, and his sober advice; his laughter, and his rages; his warm spirit, and his drunkenness.

Michael held his hand as he hallucinated, talking to some of the people who had left footprints on his memory when they had walked across his life.

Happiness is closer to the experience of acceptance and contentment than it is to pleasure. True happiness exists as the spacious and compassionate heart's willingness to feel whatever is present.

My intellectual achievement was retarded when I went to high school. I sort of sank into a black hole because I had to go to the high-achieving, academic public high school.

Foucault: Oh, you know, I don't believe that the problem of personal experience is so very important

Our own accumulated experience becomes increasingly solidified over time. That is, we start to think we know how the world works, and things that accord with that evolving viewpoint we take in much more easily than things that seem to contradict how we think the world works. This evolution is a kind of ongoing process to the extent that we need to understand further and further how the world works.

It's also important here to distinguish between what's possible to know and understand firsthand from information that must be delivered second-, third-, fourth-hand by a various media; that is, mediated information, which is more and more the case. I mean, we know less and less about the world firsthand than we do through other sources of information.

What I hear as noise is perceived as music by my teenage grandchildren, at a fairly primitive level of perceptual experience. And

When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh.

I can make a case that I regret nothing. After all, most of my mistakes turned out to be things I survived, or turned into funny stories, or, on occasion, even made money from.

I] had gotten to the point where I simply could not make a bad vinaigrette, this was not exactly the stuff of drama. (Even now, I cannot believe Mark would want to risk losing that vinaigrette. You just don't bump into vinaigrettes that good.)

Everything is copy.

But mostly I wrote letters of gratitude: the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read, but it doesn't happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I'm truly beside myself.

Failure, they say, is a growth experience; you learn from failure. I wish that were true. It seems to me the main thing you learn from failure is that it's entirely possible you will have another failure.

In fact, looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about fifty years old.

People always say that once it goes away you forget the pain. It's a cliche of childbirth. You forget the pain. I don;t happen to agree. I remember the pain. What you really forget is love.

As a longtime journalist, this quote from the delicious Nora Ephron made me smile in recognition of its truth: Working as a journalist is exactly like being the wallflower at the orgy...everyone else is having a marvelous time, laughing merrily, eating, drinking, having sex in the back room, and I am standing on the side taking notes.

On some level, my life has been wasted on me. After all, if I can't remember it, who can?

If I go see a play or a movie for a second time, it's as if I didn't see it at all the first time, even if the first time was just recently. I have no idea who anyone in People magazine is.

I have not yet reached the nadir of old age, the Land of Anecdote, but I'm approaching it.

I'm old. I am sixty-nine years old. I'm not really old, of course. Really old is eighty. But if you are young, you would definitely think that I'm old.

Terminé el guion y la película se hizo. Aprendo enseguida de la experiencia, y la lección que aprendí en este caso fue que había tenido muchísima suerte de no heredar una suma importante de dinero, porque no habría terminado de escribir Cuando Harry encontró a Sally, una película que cambió mi vida. Cuando Harry

Here's a strange thing: Whenever I read a book I love, I start to remember all the other books that have sent me into rapture, and I can remember where I was living and the couch I was sitting on when I read them.

Memories are nice little possessions. As long as you don't ignore the present when you take them out to play.