Quotes About Experience

Le stazioni sono vere, sono specchi delle città nel cui cuore sono piantate. Le stazioni stanno vicine alle cattedrali, alle moschee, alle pagode o ai mausoleo. Una volta arrivati lì, si è arrivati davvero.

Il passato è un'indispensabile guida per chi vuol visitare il presente o immaginarsi il futuro. In tutti i miei viaggi mi porto sempre dietro i libri di qualcuno che ha percorso quella strada prima di me. Non solo mi fanno compagnia, ma me ne servo come termine di paragone, come misura di quello che vedo.

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.

Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.

I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.

Growing and opening the inner life in order for us to more fully take in the world is an essential part of coming to our senses.

We don't merely want to see beauty: we want to become part of it.

Nothing is as good as the smell of horse shit. You know, the streets are swept clean now, and all the horses are gone, so there is nothing in the air but the soot of your burning engines…that's why I like to sleep in a barn, to be close to real smells. Horse shit and horse farts. Those are the smells of real life.

the pleasures of literary fiction are the pleasures of orientation; the pleasures of literature are the pleasures of bewilderment.

Some people are lucky enough to stumble across the right path straight away; most of us only discover what the right one is by going down the wrong one first.

The farther it gets from the bench it was worked on, the more real the real world becomes.

I am the the type to have a personal experience with a celebrity, but I'm too classy to bring that up.

Because of our ability to imagine an enjoyment that the symbolic order prohibits, the imaginary offers us a separate register of experience, distinct from the symbolic order.

Imaginary experience never actually breaks from the structure of the symbolic order. Our imaginary enjoyment remains a confined and policed enjoyment, an enjoyment relatively amenable to symbolic authority.

Art becomes an experience rather than a text that one interprets, and an experience resists universalization.

object at the exact moment it achieved total success. Love always leaves the subject with a sense of its failure or incompletion, but this incompletion must be experienced as the indication of love's authenticity rather than its absence.

Love is the most radical experience we can have as subjects.

So far, at least, I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.

If you've never known someone your own age who's died, you can't imagine what it feels like. It's as if you were walking on a glass floor and it suddenly shatters and now you're falling and falling and there's broken glass in the air all around you and no bottom in sight.

Poetry asks people to have values, form opinions, care about some other part of experience besides making money and being successful on the job.

Violence is central in our lives, a constant and unavoidable reality. Experience is not a linear construct moving from one point to another - childhood to maturity, "bad" to "good," beginning to end - but a wheel turning around a point that shifts between hope and despair. "At the still point of the turning world," the job of the artist is not to resolve or beautify, but to hold complexities, to see and make clear.

Sometimes memory is like a dream. The worst nightmares are forgotten. Sometimes living is a nightmare. Just getting up, meeting your neighbors, and walking down the street.

People are drawn across the bridge of belief by their anticipation of a better experience and a better life. Effective leaders ignite people's imaginations by painting vivid, compelling, and personally relevant pictures—ones that move them. As John Quincy Adams made clear, "If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.

Fiction is about feeling, which is to say that short stories are about all of us.