Quotes About Experience

They were boastful, triumphant; it seemed to both that they had read every book in the world; known every sin, passion, and joy. Civilizations stood round them like flowers ready for picking. Ages lapped at their feet like waves fit for sailing.

There it was, all round them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity.

She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup. as if there was an eddy--there--and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it.

You were given a sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain..; yet in absence, in the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent, let you touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel of it and understanding, after years of lying lost.

she heard some voice saying she couldn't paint, saying she couldn't create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them.

You look, eat, smile, are bored, pleased, annoyed - that is all I know. Yet this shadow which has sat by me for an hour or two, this mask from which peep two eyes, has power to drive me back, to pinion me down among all those other faces, to shut me in a hot room; to send me dashing like a moth from candle to candle.

She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year. It increased, he said. Alas, perhaps, but one should be glad of it- it went on increasing in his experience.

For it was extraordinary to think that they had been capable of going on living all these years when she had not though of them more than once all that time. How eventful her own life had been, during those same years. Yet perhaps Carrie Manning had not thought about her either. The thought was strange and distasteful.

La bellezza del mondo ha due tagli, uno di gioia, l'altro d'angoscia, e taglia in due il cuore.

I have written this book quicker than any other," she notes in her diary, "[and] it is all a joke; & yet gay & quick reading I think; a writers holiday. I feel more and more sure that I will never write a novel again

Now, the truth is that when one has been in a state of mind (as nurses call it)— and the tears still stood in Orlando's eyes — the thing one is looking at becomes, not itself, but another thing, which is bigger and much more important and yet remains the same thing.

How immense must be the force of life which turns a baby , who can just distinguish a great blot of blue and purple on a black background, into the child who thirteen years later can feel all that I felt on May 5th 1895 - now almost exactly to a day, forty-four years ago - when my mother died.

this diminished the entire joy, the pure joy, of the two notes sounding together, and let the sound die on her ear now with a dismal flatness.

That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.

And are you in love? And are you happy? And do you sometimes write a poem? And have you had your hair cut? And have you met anybody of such beauty your eyes dance, as the waves danced

In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another

Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.

What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech-and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Picadilly.

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past.

The red carnation that stood in the vase on the table of the restaurant when we dined together with Percival is become a six-sided flower; made of six lives

Pareva più il ricordo del dolore che il dolore stesso.

ViaÈ›a este ceea ce vezi în ochii oamenilor; viaÈ›a este ceea ce aceÈ™tia înva?? È™i, înv??ând, nu înceteaz? niciodat? s? fie conÈ™tienÈ›i de asta, deÈ™i încearc? s-o ascund? - ce anume?

In short, every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.