Quotes About Experience

The point is, everything, bad or good, boils back to the decade on the needle, and the years before that imbibing everything from cocaine to Romilar, pot to percs, LSD to liquid meth and a pharmacy in between: a lifetime spent altering the single niggling fact that to be alive means being conscious. More or less.

Someone who has come through heartache and maintains wit and charm is far more interesting than someone who has been kept on a pedestal all her life.

Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. These are first-person memories—I memories. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief.

Weren't movies his generation's faith anyway--its true religion? Wasn't the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral?...what was that but a religion?

And if a moment exists only in one's perception anyway, then perhaps the rush of feeling he has now is THE MOMENT, and not merely its shadow.

Being alive isn't the same thing as living

the more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe

And if a moment exists only in one's perception anyway, then perhaps the rush of feeling he has now is THE MOMENT, and not merely its shadow. Maybe every moment occurs at once, and they will always be twenty-two, their lives always before them.

Stories are people. I'm a story, you're a story . . . your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we're less alone.

our lives have a way of eddying back on themselves, offering us the same view over and over, daring us to get it right just once.

Everyone sees the same movie, but every reader experiences a different book, because reading involves you in hours of active, creative work, the characters, their movements and thoughts re-created in your own mind, their struggles and triumphs connecting to your own until a book becomes like a piece of music you've played—and sometimes mastered—over a period of days, or weeks.

Stories are people. I'm a story, you're a story . . . Your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we're less alone.

Weren't movies his generation's faith anyway—its true religion? Wasn't the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons—but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it!

Each gray hair still seemed like a weevil in a flower bed.

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character—what we believe—none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!" Debra

That's why people write books and stories, no doubt, to leave some impression behind, to share a sense of the beauty and pain. This

But anyone who has been in love knows that love is just the beginning. You learn more every day, every year, every decade, and not just about the object of your affection, but about yourself, and about the nature of love itself, and eventually, about the nature of loss.

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. —Milan Kundera   T

Like, you just did not expect to feel this way but you do, and it's what writers for centuries have called "melancholia" but because you don't read books, your language is limited.

There is no time frame that dictates when and how you'll feel what you feel. You just get to deal with hell however, and whenever, it hits you.

I think of the feel of water. The way it is when you wade into the ocean and a small wave cascades against you, swirling sand over you and awakening every pore.

She pictures love as a pond to be stepped into, swum around in, and then climbed out of and toweled off before getting too chilly.

Martin was swept up in the sound—no longer blood and bone, frozen feet and hungry belly, but an empty vessel filling with notes, carried by something older and bigger and more permanent than himself.

Your hands already know too much.