Quotes About Experience

All of a sudden something breaks off sharply. The adventure is over, time resumes its daily routine. I turn; behind me, this beautiful melodious form sinks entirely into the past. It grows smaller, contracts as it declines, and now the end makes one with the beginning.

Do you regret those days?' 'No,' replied Marcelle acidly: 'but I regret the life I might have had.

I get up. I move through this pale light; I see it change beneath my hands and on the sleeves of my coat: I cannot describe how much it disgusts me.

There's the story of a person who does this, does that, but it isn't I, I have nothing in common with him. He travels through countries I know no more about than if I had never been there. Sometimes, in my story, it happens that I pronounce these fine names you read in atlases, Aranjuez or Canterbury. New images are born in me, images such as people create from books who have never travelled. My words are dreams, that is all.

What sort of adventures?' I asked him, astonished. 'All sorts, Monsieur. Getting on the wrong train. Stopping in an unknown city. Losing your briefcase, being arrested by mistake, spending the night in prison. Monsieur, I believe the word adventure could be defined: an event out of the ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary.

There are also amateurs. These are secretaries, office workers, shopkeepers, people who listen to others in cafes: around forty they feel swollen, with an experience they can't get rid of. Luckily they've made children on whom they can pass it off. They would like to make us believe that their past is not lost, that their memories are condensed, gently transformed into Wisdom.

For the moment they wanted to live with the least expenditure, economize words, gestures, thoughts, float: they had only one day in which to smooth out their wrinkles, their crow's feet, the bitter lines made by a hard week's work. One day only.

For a moment I wondered if I were not going to love humanity. But, after all, it was their Sunday, not mine.

Dans mes mains, par exemple, il y a quelque chose de neuf, une certaine façon de prendre ma pipe ou ma fourchette. Ou bien c'est la fourchette qui a, maintenant, une certaine façon de se faire prendre, je ne sais pas.

Every sound comes into my ears dirty because you've heard it on the way

Hiçbir ÅŸey deÄŸiÅŸmedi, ama yine de her ÅŸey baÅŸka bir biçimde var olup gidiyor. Anlatam?yorum. Bulant?ya benziyor bu, ama ayn? zamanda onun tam tersi.

Pour que l'événement le plus banal devienne une aventure, il faut et il suffit qu'on se mette à le raconter.

Obviously, nothing new has happened in a manner of speaking. This morning, at a quarter past eight, as I was leaving the Hôtel Printania to go to the library, I tried to pick up a piece of paper lying on the ground and didn't succeed. That's all, and it isn't even an event. Yes, but, to tell the whole truth, it made a profound impression on me: it occurred to me that I was no longer free.

But an adventure never returns nor is prolonged.

And naturally, everything they tell about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It is to this way of happening that I clung so tightly.

You see a woman, you think that one day she'll be old, only you don't see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure.

I do not cease to experience my being-for-others; my possibilities do not cease to "die", nor do the distances cease to unfold toward me in terms of the stairway where somebody "could" be, in terms of this dark corner where a human presence "could" hide. Better yet, if I tremble at the slightest noise, if each creak announces to me a look, this is because I am already in the state of being-looked-at.

This feeling of adventure definitely does not come from events: I have proved it. It's rather the way in which the moments are linked together. I think this is what happens: you suddenly feel that time is passing, that each instant leads to another, this one to another one, and so on; that each instant is annihilated, and that it isn't worth while to hold it back, etc., etc. (. . .) If I remember correctly, they call that the irreversibility of time.

J'ai voulu que les moments de ma vie se suivent et s'ordonnent comme ceux d'une vie qu'on se rappelle. Autant vaudrait tenter d'attraper le temps par la queue.

Duc în spate o soarta prea grea, pentru tinereÅ£ea mea!

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered.

My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.

All these objects... how can I explain? They inconvenienced me; I would have liked the to exist less strongly, more dryly, in a more abstract way, with more reserve.

U mojim rukama, na primer, ima ne?eg novog, izvestan na?in na koji uzimam lulu ili viljušku. Ili pak sad viljuška ima izvestan na?in na koji se da uzeti, ne znam.