Quotes About Experience

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

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.

An astute observer might suggest that my emphasis on connection probably comes from experience of its opposite. And that's true. I know what it's like to feel disconnected, on the outside, estranged, not only from other people, but also from myself. I spent many years trying to reassemble the fragments of my divided self and reconnect them.

Every childhood is a dismantling of wholeness, and every adulthood is a process of putting the pieces together again.

Personal religious experience is not necessarily the same as organized religious doctrine. My concern is that as a contemporary women we have lost the capacity to make this distinction.

When we work through our own grief, we can cut to the heart of the common universal experience, which opens us to feel for others.

Unless a man or woman has experienced the darkness of the soul he or she can know nothing of that transforming laughter without which no hint of the ultimate reality of the opposites can be faintly intuited.

In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: 'Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.' He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either.

When you are learning how to do something, you do not have to worry about whether or not you are good at it. But when you have done something, have learned how to do it, you are not safe any more. Being an expert opens you up to judgement.

the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them. Once, twice. Perhaps never again.

When we meet animals for the first time, we expect them to conform to the stories we've heard about them. But there is always, always a gap. The boar was still a surprise. Animals are.

In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: 'Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.' He could not imagine a human love returned.

so that new things I encountered, then, seemed souvenirs from the distant past.

Time didn't run forwards any more. It was a solid thing you could press yourself against and feel it push back; a thick fluid, half-air, half-glass, that flowed both ways and sent ripples of recollection forwards and new events backwards

and it was there, standing on the edge of a village playing field, that I gratefully stepped into novicehood again, as if I had never seen a hawk in my life.

When you are learning how to do something, you do not have to worry about whether or not you are good at it. But when you have done something, have learned how to do it, you are not safe any more.

Time didn't run forwards any more. It was a solid thing you could press yourself against and feel it push back; a thick fluid, half-air, half-glass, that flowed both ways and sent ripples of recollection forwards and new events backwards so that new things I encountered, then, seemed souvenirs from the distant past. Sometimes, a few times, I felt my father must be sitting near me as I sat on a train or in a café. This was comforting. It all was. Because

What we see in the lives of animals are lessons we've learned from the world.

You don't know anything about them, but you feel the other person's there, one friend told me. It's like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow. History

My vision blurs. We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost.

It must have been like death,'3 he wrote, 'the thing which we can never know beforehand.

You are a man whose eyes are bright with unspilled tears when you tell me of the horror of your journey here.

Wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. The poem tells me it's no big deal that I'm not like Snow. I can be another thing; I'm meant to be another thing.

School is one long illness with symptoms that switch every five minutes so you think it's getting better or worse. But really it's the same thing for years and years.