Quotes About Experience

Thinking none of this but feeling all of it

Almost everything interesting in the human experience is the result of an individual experiencing, experimenting, explaining, and sharing

Even places of power are useless unless you're prepared to bring something to them. And I don't mean just the things we brought—they're to the real sacrament what the lump of bread is to the Eucharist. Then, if you come away the same person you were, you know it wasn't really a place of power.

Of course it's all a game. All of the good and hard and even bad things in life are just a game.

feels the same about life - that involvement with it is like the Catholic Communion only the World is the Host, and it must be chewed.

Sounds like

What do you think of the war, M. Severn? [...] What can one think of war? I said, tasting the wine again. It was quite good, though nothing in the Web could match my memories of French Bordeaux. War does not call for judgment, I said, merely survival.

For some reason it's as difficult, perhaps more difficult, this time. Dying should become easier with practice.

I think about how we can't always live in the moment because moments pass, and when we're lucky, we have the kind of moments that we can't help wanting to go back to. We think about them, remember how they felt, and when more time passes we tell stories of these moments that are worth reliving.

I know certain truths about life.

Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

Bessel van der Kolk: "The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.

What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest day; / Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn.

I tell my students, who are concerned with the question of betrayal, that when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own. I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person's experience is not another's.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror," Rilke wrote. Nearly

What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are?

There is no other life than this. You would not have stumbled into the vastly imperfect, beautiful, impossible present.

Sometimes people suggested that I must have an amazing memory—that surely I must recall so many scenes, moments, sensory details from my early years. But the truth is that I have a terrible memory. I struggled to access any of my childhood or even my teenage years. I had no recollection of it as a story. And so I followed my own line of words to see where it would lead me.

Would it always matter? Lines from a Delmore Schwartz poem come to mind: "What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest

My life is a museum," says my ninety-one-year-old aunt. "I can walk through any of the galleries at any time.

Reading is an exercise in empathy. To read is to enter another world in a way different from any other art form.

What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.

course, if you haven't received