Quotes About Experience

The Sayings of Confucius: "At fifteen I thought only of study; at thirty I began playing my role; at forty I was sure of myself; at fifty I was conscious of my position in the universe; at sixty I was no longer argumentative; and now at seventy I can follow my heart's desire without violating custom."1

Just coming out of your mother's womb does not make you a human being. - Just getting old doesn't make you wise.

Don't ever fancy, no matter how hard a thing you have to go through, that your experience is unique. This old world has been going on a good many hundred years, and there are precious few situations that haven't happened over and over again. Cheer up, child; that's a model letter, and you're a good little sport!

and often Lisa thought bitterly of the ideas she had held on "college life" before coming to Denton, ideas and images culled from a hundred magazine stories and as many movies. Where were the convertibles, the secret bottles of liquor, the gay young men and their wild girl friends?

One of the things we do as poets, is to try to preserve experiences, people, places important to us, in an effort to save them from time's erasure.

Men have so often written about women without knowing the reality of their lives, and worse, without being interested in that daily reality.

Rosie, ah Rosie," dedi bana bir gün. "Gül yüzündeki saatten anlad???m kadar?yla, otuzuna gelmiÅŸ olmal?s?n." (s. 17)

You write from what you know but you write into what you don't know.

The closet implies a literal, physical boundary dividing one's life before publicly declaring queerness, and after. It's a threshold impossible to recross, two distinct places to live: in the darkness, or in the light of one's self-truth. It doesn't promise stepping into the light will be easy, but it does imply a fundamentally altered human experience.

Not because she read my name on an anonymous posting board, but because I was in Paris and had seen Moulin Rouge far too many times to let such an opportunity go to waste.

One pill makes you largerAnd one pill makes you smallAnd the ones that mother gives youDon't do anything at all.Go ask AliceWhen she's ten feet tall.

Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years.

You need to be an adrenalin junkie when you travel with kids.

But live shows are cool. I just got back into the idea of enjoying it live.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

The man walked from his shoulders, anticipating life's next blow, the way ageing boxers did.

There is no "mid" about it. Life is a crisis from the cradle to the grave.

I'm often dating people, but I don't say it because you sort of know it won't last long.

He had turned the loss of his virginity into a campaign, when all it took was a few sous and five minutes of his time. (pg 21)

How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting.

So what was it then exactly, this truth-telling? ... It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life —of so many more than we think—can never be explained at all.

They were savages, yet they were ghosts. The two most terrible and dreaded foes of civilised experience seemed combined at once in them.

Never let schooling interfere with education.

Rock and roll was not just a revolution in musical style; it was a primary embodiment of a transformation in the way many people, in America and elsewhere, lived, felt about, and thought about their lives and their relation to immediate experience.