Quotes About Experience

The smell of life." "The smell of farts.

And had Eliot really been awake for the whole thing? His brain dealt out a sloppy fan of mental Polaroids, out of sequence: an image of Janet kissing Eliot, of her hand working diligently between Eliot's legs. Had she really been weeping? Had he kissed Eliot? A vivid sense memory of somebody else's stubble, surprisingly scratchy, chafing his cheek and upper lip.

He wasn't very far from the bitter, angry teenager he'd been in Brooklyn, before this all started, and thank God for that. But the funny thing was that after all this time he still didn't think that that miserable teenager had been wrong. He didn't disagree with him -he still felt solidarity with him in major points

The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.

She was dying to look, but she supposed that if she lived her life properly then by the time it was over she'd know what was in it. That was sort of the whole point, wasn't it? To understand your own story? Reading the book now would just be cheating. And what kind of jackass cheats at life?

had only been at SUM a year

Suffering "buys" something, and this something possesses a certain value for all of us, for common consciousness; by suffering we buy the right to judge.

Reading a hard copy book, and reading a book on an iPad are slightly different experiences. What they both have in common though is that you must engage your imagination in the process.

You see it's a peculiar case. It won't be like an ordinary marriage, a young couple and so on, nor a mariage de convenance, either, in the ordinary sense. Here are two lonely people intending to live solitary lives. Suddenly, you -- most kindly, I must say -- introduce us. I, with my great experience and my instinctive flair, see immediately that this is the right woman in the right place. I bother her until she consents -- and there you are.

I never subscribe to the stay-at-home policy. I'm not sick of the road or sick of eating in good restaurants around the country. I like to travel.

We're all dealt with the same hand here, so to speak. I feel like I've had it a lot better than most people. I've had the opportunity to travel and play music all my life.

As rowdy as the place was, I've seen rowdier times playing fraternity parties in Oklahoma.

The dream-state, from the standpoint of the waking, consists only of thinking and feeling. But the dreamer has no idea that he is dreaming, for according to his experience, tangible objects are also perceived. Thus the dream-state is definable in exactly the same terms as the waking.

The worst Persian voluptuary could never have imagined my most ordinary day.

Our native susceptibilities and acquired tastes determine which of the many qualities in an object shall most impress us, and be most clearly recalled. One man remembers the combustible properties of a substance, which to another is memorable for its polarising property; to one man a stream is so much water-power, to another a rendezvous for lovers.

Science is the systematic classification of experience.

Individual experiences being limited and individual spontaneity feeble, we are strengthened and enriched by assimilating the experience of others.

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. It deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities. It stores up the accumulated experience of the race, connecting Past and Present into a conscious unity; and with this store it feeds successive generations, to be fed in turn by them.

Plain and simple, skydiving is all about controlled terror, and I love it.

Watching myself tell a story that I don't remember telling because adventures in psychedelics have consequences.

I lost my virginity to a record skip. "Lay Lady Lay--Lay Lady Lay--Lay Lady Lay". We didn't even get to the big brass bed part.

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await others. I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.