Quotes About Experience

Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is an armour.

The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.

I you ask me about the monks, I speak from experience, not prejudice, and though I have no doubt that some foundations are well governed, my experience has been of waste and corruption. May I suggest to Your Majesty that, if you wish to see a parade of the seven deadly sins, you do not organise a masque at court but call without notice at a monastery?

I had read all the books so hard that when I gave them back the print was faint and gray with exhaustion

He saw how, as she received the bundle, the woman shuddered from the nape of her neck to her feet. She held it fast though, and a head is heavier than you expect. Having been on a battlefield, he knows this from experience too.

You are only young once, they say, but doesn't go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty?

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.

The day is a fiesta of pain.

Told me if I did not smell of the fire then I smelled of the frying pan.

A shock will do it, he said, or strong emotion, strong emotion of any sort. It can be horror. Or disgust. But, then again, it doesn't have to be. Sometimes, he said, people die laughing.

People say, "loss," she reflected, but they do not know what innocence is like. Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is armour; and she felt already clad.

There are moments when a memory moves right through you. You shy, you duck, you run; or else the past takes your fist and actuates it, without the intervention of will. Suppose you have a knife in your fist? That's how murder happens.

It was just that I was unsuited to being a child.

He has always done what was needed to survive, and if his judgement of what was necessary was sometimes questionable. . . that is what it is to be young.

As the combatants will always tell you, you really needed to see it, you had to be there. . .

Let him hear the conclusion of events; he does not need to live through them.

I doubt if there is much I can teach them.

You feel nauseous, from the sticky heat and what you know of human nature, and you wonder why you have come. But you have been told that a man must go at least once in his life, or he won't believe it when other people tells him what went on.

I doubt if there is much I can teach them. Or much they can learn.

Once, when Tom was over here, to tease Rose, I asked him, "Before she was born, can you remember? Were things just the same as they are these days? Did it still rain and get dark and all the stuff it does now? Did the sun go up and down in exactly the same way?" Yes," Tom said, and then he smiled at Rose and said, "No. Not really. Not exactly the same way.

I used to think that fifteen would be nearly grown up," said her sister Naomi, "until you started being it

Success and failure are greatly overrated. But failure gives you a whole lot more to talk about.

Amerika is wie Föhn, je länger man da ist, um so schlimmer wird's.