Quotes About Experience

It's so amazing to hear a crowd of people singing one of your songs. It's the best feeling.

My father lived to the age where he attained a deep luster, but never too shiny that you didn't believe him for one minute, may we all understand our own quitting time so well.

Failure doesn't only make us stronger; it makes us smarter and grateful and . . . more humble.

Todo joven comete errores -dijo Makoto-. Es nuestro destino tener que convivir con las consecuecias.

Al igual que el río siempre está a la puerta, así está siempre el mundo de puertas afuera. Y es en ese mundo donde estamos obligados a vivir.

But just as the river is always at the door, so is the world always outside. And it is in the world that we have to live.

I am what I am and what I have always been, a poor soul on a journey.

The world is always outside. And it is in the world that we must live.

You could try as hard as you could to imagine someone else's tragedy—drowning in icy waters, living in a city split by a wall—but nothing truly hurts until it happens to you. Most of all, to your child.

It was good to remember that for every horrible memory from her marriage, there was also a happy one. She wanted to see it clearly, to understand that it wasn't all black, or all white. It was a million colors. And yes, ultimately it hadn't worked out, but that was okay. Just because a marriage ended didn't mean that it hadn't been happy at times. She thought about that

Each memory, good and bad, was another invisible thread that bound them together, even when they were foolishly thinking they could lead separate lives. It was as simple and complicated as that.

Elderly women were as tough as nails but it seemed that men got softer as they aged; their emotions caught them off guard, as if some protective barrier had been worn away by time.

Every day is a gift, Jake. Of course sometimes it's a really horrible gift that you don't want.

As seductive as it might have been to erase the grief and pain of the last ten years, it was also a lie. Young Alice was a fool. A sweet, innocent fool. Young Alice hadn't experienced ten years of living.

It's easy to think the minefield wasn't that bad once you're safely watching other people get blown up.

You could try as hard as you could to imagine someone else's tragedy - but nothing truly hurts until it happens to you.

Now it seemed like she could twist the lens on her life and see it from two entirely different perspectives. The perspective of her younger self. Her younger, sillier, innocent self. And her older, wiser, more cynical and sensible self.

It was good to remember that for every horrible memory from her marriage, there was also a happy one.

For the first time in her sixty-nine years she felt the fear: the fear every woman knows is always waiting for her, the possibility that lurks and scuttles in the shadows of her mind, even if she's spent her entire life being so tenderly loved and protected by good men.

Was she ever grumpy? Did she ever yell? Fall about laughing? Eat too much? Drink too much? Call out for someone to bring her toilet paper? Lose her car keys? Was she ever just a human being?

She generally felt that the advice she offered was superior to the advice she received. Other people's problems were so simple; one's own problems tended to be so much more nuanced.

This Thursday night felt like adolescence: exquisitely painful and sharply beautiful.

She closed her eyes and felt everyhting: the warmth of the café, the taste of the muffin, the by now familiar smell of coffee and secondhand books.

It seems to make no difference that she still feels exactly the same person as when she was twenty-five, the birthdays just keep right on coming.