Quotes About Experience

Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time.

Fortunately, her year of graduate classes prepared her for obnoxious conduct.

I'm a mother. You name it, I've seen it and probably had to mop it up," said Lucy.

Are you old enough to be young again?

Don't ever let one moment take anything away from another.

Past all the silliness of youth -- with its insecurities, cheap thrills, and ill-fitting identities -- lies the snug comfort of age.

I had to weave and play around with a honey bear, you know, and I could wrestle with him a little bit, but there's no way you can even wrestle a honey bear, let alone a grizzly bear that's standing ten feet to eleven feet tall! Can you imagine? But it was fascinating to work that close to that kind of animal.

What is the separation between information and the unfolding of phenomena?

The unfolding of phenomena is dependent on ignorance.

There is no relation between using the mind — as one does, in repairing shoes, and seeing it.

An event is not in the person.

Life is like a school; one can learn, one can graduate, one can skip a grade or stay behind.

We're all bozos on the bus, so we might as well sit back and enjoy the ride.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh.

The book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty -- and vice versa.

The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.

I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme ... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.

The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.

What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.

Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world.

Writing can't be a way of life -- the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the "fifties" or "sixties," as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.