Quotes About Experience

It's that moment about two months in, when you think you've finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It's a delusion—you've only been there eight weeks—and it's followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It's the briefest, purest euphoria.

I didn't want to miss the euphoria. I haven't, have I? You said it happened at the second-month mark.

moment about two months in, when you think you've finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It's a delusion—you've only been there eight weeks—and it's followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It's the briefest, purest euphoria.

The waiter brought our food: beef, mash, and thick yellow English wax beans— the type I'd hoped never in my life to see again.

His interest lay in experiencing, in doing. Thinking was derivative. Dull. The opposite of living. Whereas she suffered through the humidity and the sago and the lack of plumbing only for the thinking.

I forget to mention the heavy menstrual bleeding and the pain.

Even still, it took a long time to feel much of anything again.

Polky Polky I used to call it." "Dot Dot, actually." Hanne smiled. "Dot Dot. I thought you were the most beautiful singer in the whole world." Oda felt pitched up onto the crest of a wave, like one of those boats far out at sea.

Third date, I want to say, but I can't with Silas. Our dates are not self-conscious like that. We don't acknowledge that they're happening or say what they mean. IT all feels a bit haphazard and weightless, and to call attention to this might let out too much of the air.

But she was aware that the story you think you know is never the real one. She wanted his real one. What would he say about it all? She could imagine writing a whole book on him alone.

La cucina bears the scents of its past, and every event in its history is recorded with an olfactory memorandum. Here vanilla, coffee, nutmeg, and confidences; there the milky-sweet smell of babies, old leather, sheep's cheese, and violets. In the corner by the larder hangs the stale tobacco smell of old age and death, while the salty scent of lust and satiation clings to the air by the cellar steps along with the aroma of soap, garlic, beeswax, lavender, jealousy, and disappointment.

Life is a lesson. You learned it when you're through.

When one's thoughts and experience have not reached a certain point for reading a masterpiece, the masterpiece will leave only a bad flavor on his palate.

A good traveler is one who who does not know where he is going to , and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from.

So long as man is man, variety will still be the flavor of life.

Il n'y a pas de livres en ce monde que chacun devrait lire, il n'y a que des livres qu'une personne devrait lire à un certain moment, dans un certain endroit, dans des circonstances données et à une certaine époque de sa vie. Je crois que la lecture, comme le mariage, est déterminée par le destin.

You have no idea how quickly a girl grows up.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

There are no books in this world that everybody must read, but only books that a person must read at a certain time in a given place under given circumstances and at a given period of his life.

In this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all, and to the young it comes with bittered agony because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to expect it.

I ask, then, if experience does not speak in thunder-tones, telling us that the policy which has given peace to the country heretofore, being returned to, gives the greatest promise of peace again.

All the strange, checkered past seems to crowd upon my mind.

We have, what, 66,000-odd guests here today? And not one of them retains even an infant's sense of self-preservation. They checked their fight-or-flight instincts at the door. That's what they're paying for. They see a fire, hear an explosion, feel their roller coaster begin to shear off its track—what are they gonna do? Laugh all the harder. Because they think it's part of the act. That makes every last one of them a sitting duck.

hunting down those moments that unintentionally tip the reader out of the dream.