Quotes About Experience

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.

No emotion is the final one.

Trust me, I'm telling you stories.

Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember. Lies 2: Time is a straight line. Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not. Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time. Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...) Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon. Lies 7: Reality is truth.

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many.

It doesn't have to be like that but mostly it is.

I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.

The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.

You said, 'Why do I frighten you?' Frighten me? Yes you do frighten me. You act as though we will be together for ever. You act as though there is infinite pleasure and time without end. How can I know that? My experience has been that time always ends. In theory you are right, the quantum physicists are right, the romantics and the religious are right.

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

There's so little wonder left in the world because we've seen everything one way or another'.

I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.

I was angry. Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about.

History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

My experience has been that times always ends. In theory, you are right, the quantum physicists are right, the religious and romantics are right. Time without end. In practice we both wear a watch.

The physical memory blunders through the doors the mind has tried to seal. ... Wisdom says forget, the body howls.

What we notice in stories is the nearness of the wound to the gift.

The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

And if I say to you that I am glad of everything we have done together, and sorry that we will not be here together in forty years, laughing at a faded photo of you impersonating a lion, it having withered well, you less so, as we stand fabulously old, in a city that understands what spirit it takes to be old, to be beautiful, to be much looked at, to be itself, to be never quite caught, to have a past, to be content, to have seen much, to have remained, to have continued…

I always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don't stand on the rim, don't sit on the sidelines. Make mistakes, make a mess, get it wrong. Read everything, and get out and be in life.