Quotes About Experience

There is no division, in practice, between work and life. [An intellectual craft] is a practice that involves the whole person, continually drawing on past experience as it is projected into the future.

Every trail, however erratic and circuitous, is a kind of life-line, a trajectory of growth. 6 This image of life as a trail or path is ubiquitous among peoples whose existential orientations are founded in the practices of hunting and gathering, and in the modes of environmental perception these entail. Persons are identified and characterised not by the substantive attributes they carry into the life process, but by the kinds of paths they leave.

An imagined landscape, then, is a landscape not of being but of becoming: a composition not of objects and surfaces but of movements and stillness, not there to be surveyed but cast in the current of time.

What difference does it make that pedestrian touch carries the weight of the body rather than the weight of the object?

But if perception is thus a function of movement, then what we perceive must, at least in part, depend on how we move. Locomotion, not cognition, must be the starting point for the study of perceptual activity. Or more strictly, cognition should not be set off from locomotion, along the lines of a division between head and heels, since walking is itself a form of circumambulatory knowing.

Life itself is as much a long walk as it is a long conversation, and the ways along which we walk are those along which we live.

Ao invés de pensar em nós mesmos apenas como observadores, trilhando nosso caminho ao redor dos objetos espalhados pelo chão de um mundo já formado, devemos imaginar-nos, em primeiro lugar, como participantes, cada um imerso com todo nosso ser nas correntes de um mundo em formação: na luz solar nós vemos, a chuva na qual ouvimos e o vento no qual sentimos.

The groundlessness of modern society, characterized by the reduction of pedestrian experience to the operation of a stepping machine, and by the corresponding elevation of head over heels as the locus of creative intelligence, is…deeply embedded in the structures of public life in western societies.

Meyrueis, Lozère, June 26, 1977. Hot and overcast. I take my gear out of the car and put my bike together. Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafés. Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.

The facts miss the heart of the matter; to give us a clear picture, the facts need a vehicle, the anecdote

Alchemy should have no part in a Je'daii's experience. It is a dark force, arcane and dangerous. It has the power to upset balance. There are other ways.

Eight in the morning, clear sky, already ninety degrees in the shade, the world was nothing like it had been yesterday.

Repetition opens doors, you know?

I feel like that I'm learning all the time. I'm learning from new artists, from established artists... every time I listen to '70s rock 'n' roll records, I'm learning. And I think that I'm just now starting to get a hold on what I do.

We all take different paths in life, but no matter where we go, we take a little of each othereverywhere.

I hate plays. I've never seen the point of paying money to watch people shout a lot and pretend to die, and now that I'm the father of three young children I don't have to.

They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.

It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.

you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.

the glass of wine I've drunk is beginning to take a few corners off the world...

What a beautiful respite a train journey is and a good book, too, and best of all the book on the train, in life and out of it at the same time, before we arrive at Termini and disembark and the book is put down and we must all part and go our separate ways, forever.