Quotes About Experience

There are some books that LIVE, she mused. They are young with us, and they grow old with us.

Nothing has really happened unless it's been described [in words].

For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, This is what I have made of it! This! And what had she made of it? What, indeed?

Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.

I burn, I shiver, out of this sun, into this shadow.

I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin.

With my cheek leant upon the window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massy wall of time, which is forever lifting and pulling and letting fresh spaces of life in upon us. May it be mine to taste the moment before it has spread itself over the rest of the world! Let me taste the newest and the freshest.

Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?

At the moment I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Ah well, so be it. The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent's Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained — at last! — the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence — the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

She felt very young;at the same time unspeakably aged.She sliced like a knife through everything;at the same time was outside,looking on...far out to sea and alone;she always had the feeling that it was very,very dangerous to live even one day

Here am I shedding one of my life-skins and all they will say is, 'Bernard is spending ten days in Rome'.

Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotion made the ply of human life.

Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life.

It is one of those invaluable seeds, from which, since it is impossible to have every experience fully, one can grow something that represents other people's experiences. Often one has to make do with seeds; the germs of what might have been, had one's life been different.

This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.

The journey is everything. Most necessary of all, but rarest good fortune, we should try to find some man of our own sort who will go with us and to whom we can say the first thing that comes into our heads. For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.

One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in it.

Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of darkness.

What she liked was simply life. That's what i did it for, she said, speaking aloud to life... Could any man understand what she meant, either, about life? …But to go deeper, beneath what people said, and these judgments, how superficial, how fragmentary, they are. In her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? It was an offering…it was her gift.

These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.

She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

Modern women are frustrated and angry, their experience is limited; modern men are obsessed with the letter "I"; their writing is full of self-conscious indecency, self-conscious virility. It is essentially sterile.

When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.