Quotes About Experience

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

The truth about stories is, that's all we are.

The truth about stories is that that's all we are.

It's not right to say that our loss in Vietnam turned out to be a gain. But lessons were learned. And they were the right lessons.

I think the worst way a writer can self-betray is by not being true to his or her experience of being alive. It's my belief, for what it's worth, that a lot of writers consign to the page what they think will meet with the approval, especially in the moral realm, of what their society has preached to them since they were children, almost all of which is utter bull####.

Jens Bjørneboe wrote that "he who hasn't experienced a full depression alone and over a long period of time—he is a child.

Whether you think consciousness to be a benefit or a horror, this is only what you think—and nothing else.

Ontologically, Mainländer's thought is delirious; metaphorically, it explains a good deal about human experience; practically, it may in time prove to be consistent with the idea of creation as a structure of creaking bones being eaten from within by a pestilent marrow.

Whether you think consciousness to be a benefit or a horror, this is only what you think—and nothing else. But even though you cannot demonstrate the truth of what you think, you can at least put it on show and see what the audience thinks.

Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that is, in fact, real.

Horror is not really horror unless it's your horror—that which you have known personally.

I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines.

The living have to live with it. You don't. Theirs is the grief or the gladness of your death, theirs is the loss or gain of it. Theirs is the pain and the pleasure of memory.

College is supposed to be an uncomfortable experience.

Some educators even repeat the old saw that "I learn as much from my students as they learn from me!" (With due respect to my colleagues in the teaching profession who use this expression, I am compelled to say: if that's true, then you're not a very good teacher.) The

Yes, it is unbridled ego for experts to believe they can run a democracy while ignoring its voters; it is also, however, ignorant narcissism for laypeople to believe that they can maintain a large and advanced nation without listening to the voices of those more educated and experienced than themselves.

You cannot master difficult situations without practice. You cannot practice mastery without being in the situation. When you know this, difficulty becomes an opportunity to push past your thresholds.

causing him to consider the possibility that there really was no such thing as happiness or unhappiness. Maybe there was only intensity-and then everything else.

I think it will be found that experience, the true source and foundation of all knowledge, invariably confirms its truth.

Beauty can pierce one like a pain.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.

That food was so bad I can't wait for it to become a turd and leave me.

I considered the wonder of the things that befell me, convinced that my life was the best omelet you could make with a chainsaw. -- Panama