Quotes About Experience

It's amazing how a certain time in your life can seem to be a prelude, but when you look back, you realize it was a whole work, with a beginning, middle, and end.

Outside my window, truckers trucked, hookers fucked, cops cruised, kids smoked, elders yelled, invalids slept, spouses fought, lovers kissed, while I watched a pussycat playing with stars in a black room.

For example, the great Italian Jewish author Primo Levi, who did survive Auschwitz, said afterwards, "The experience of Auschwitz for me was such as to sweep away whatever legacies of my religious education that I had retained. There is Auschwitz, therefore God cannot exist. I haven't found a solution to that dilemma.

my own health legacy of New Guinea has been a year of malaria and a year of dysentery.

From all that experience, Icelanders took away the conclusion: This is not a country in which we can enjoy the luxury of experimenting. We live in a fragile land; we know that our ways will allow at least some of us to survive; don't ask us to change.

That was part of the reason why my 1959 crisis was so traumatic to me: it was my first acute life crisis. By comparison, my 1980 and 2000 professional crises were un-traumatic. I did eventually switch career directions from membrane physiology to evolutionary physiology around 1980, and from physiology to geography after 2000. But those decisions weren't painful, because I had come to assume from my previous experience that things would probably turn out OK.

7. Honest national self-appraisal 8. Historical experience of previous national crises 9. Dealing with national failure 10. Situation-specific national flexibility 11. National core values 12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints

its contribution depends on a new framework derived from personal crises, an explicitly comparative approach, and a perspective drawn from my own life experiences and those of my friends.

Table 1.1. Factors related to the outcomes of personal crises 1. Acknowledgment that one is in crisis 2. Acceptance of one's personal responsibility to do something 3. Building a fence, to delineate one's individual problems needing to be solved 4. Getting material and emotional help from other individuals and groups 5. Using other individuals as models of how to solve problems 6. Ego strength 7. Honest self-appraisal 8. Experience of previous personal crises 9. Patience

When the parachute opens, it's this incredible feeling... You float slowly towards solid ground. And when you land, it's like you're someone brand new. You're pure. I'm convinced it's like confession for the Catholics. You should all give it a try.

If you build software, every error message is marketing

The genre is called travel writing for a reason: it involves a traveler. Mostly, the traveler in good travel writing is not a local and doesn't pretend to be.

I will never say no to viewing my friends' vacation photos, primarily because one of our tacit promises when we travel is that we'll bring back a good story—of our heightened state of living and the exaggerated adventures that befell us—and hope to let others live vicariously through it.

There's a saying in Haiti: A rich man travels, a poor man leaves.

Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable.

Lesson one in time travel, Thursday. First of all, we are all time travellers. The vast majority of us manage only one day per day.

I collect ex-boyfriends -- and more than five, at last count.

Stay close, do what I say and make as many mistakes as you want – just never the same one twice.

I'm sure it's not all hot buttered crumpets out there in the breathing world of asphalt and heartbeats.

Are all our dates going to be like that? said Perkins. I hope not, I replied with a smile, but it was quite fun, wasn't it? I mean, it's not like we were killed or eaten or anything, right? If your idea of a good date is not being killed and eaten, you'll never be disappointed.

After all, color in itself has no color — it's simply a construction of the mind: a sensation, like the Humming Chorus from Madame Butterfly and the smell of honeysuckle.

Well, each interpretation of an event, setting or character is unique to each of those who read it because they clothe the author's description with the memory of their own experiences. Every character they read is actually a complex amalgam of people they've met, read or seen before - far more real than it can ever be just from the text on the page. Because every reader's experiences are different, each book is unique for each reader.

I was glad to see I had only witnessed Dad's death and not the end of his life, as the two I learned are barely related at all.

That's the point about failure," I said. "It's an intrinsic part of success. You win some, then you lose some. But with experience and luck, you learn to lose less as the years go on.