Quotes About Experience

Sometimes I rode the Circle Line reading a book on organic chemistry and sometimes I read Leave It to Psmith for the 20th or 21st time and sometimes I watched Jeremy Brett's marvellous grotesque Sherlock Holmes or of course Seven Samurai. I sometimes went out for Tennessee Fried Chicken. Day followed day. A year went by.

Go back to your house then, and see what happiness you find there.' 'It has nothing to do with happiness.' 'It is true that marriage seems often to have little to do with happiness. But who am I to judge? I have never been married.

We are creatures of story.

I think that everything that happens to you stays in you, even if it stays in a part of your mind where you can't find it. That's why you should never try to forget when people urge you to.

Write what I know, who wants to read that? If only our apartment was haunted or I was the tiniest bit possessed by the devil.

What about your past? How often would you travel there, given the chance? Often? Never? And when you got there, would you think about staying forever?

I had been working there for several months [in New York], in that climate of intellectual openness which is so astonishing to an Australian...

there are some striking similarities with the post-Soviet experience where a heterogeneously configured and relatively marginal civic memory movement also struggles against a state that neither properly recognizes, still less commemorates the unlawfully murdered.3

Notwithstanding the currency of ideas about 'two Spains' ready to confront each other on 18 July 1936, 'us' and 'them' were categories actively made by the violent experience of the war and did not fully exist prior to it.

She had lived what so many of us had talked about.

Whatever it was that possessed him, he wouldn't have said it was love for that was a word outside his vocabulary. He just felt what he felt and the wind seemed less bitter and the sun brighter because of it.

Age is not important unless you're a cheese.

Life ... would give her everything of consequence, life would shape her, not we. All we were good for was to make the introductions.

The expert at anything was once a beginner.

The faster we travel, the less there is to see.

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

every professional was once a beginner

Time--our youth--it never really goes, does it It is all held in our minds.

The author is at one end of the experience of writing and the reader is at the other, and the book is the contract between you.

Time doesn't really soften anything. Memories heave up, you know.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.n

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved.

What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

One's life story cannot be told with complete veracity. A true autobiography would have to be written in states of mind, emotions, heartbeats, smiles and tears not in months and years, or physical events. Life is marked off on the soul by feelings, not by dates.