Quotes About Experience

His prime resource is the leaky vessel of is own memory. At times he views it thus, quite literally- as some old pail with holes and rusted seams. Alternatively, he imagines an extensive manuscript of which there survive only a handful of charred fragments; it is like trying to piece together the Gospels from the Dead Sea Scrolls....

When in a foreign country, he thought, you are behind a fence, or in a cell - everything is going on around you but you are not quite part of it. You open your mouth, and you sound like a child; you know that you are someone else, but you cannot explain it.

The regrets of old age are polarized: you wish you had not done certain things--behaved thus, responded like that--and you wish you had seized more of the day, been greedier, packed more in.

Reading fiction, I see through the prism of another person's understanding; reading everything else, I am travelling--I am travelling in the way that I still can: new sights, new experiences. I am reminded sometimes of the intensity of childhood reading, that absolute absorption when the very ability to read was a heady new gain, the gateway to a different place, to a parallel universe you hadn't known was there. The one entirely benign mind-altering drug.

There's this piece of contemporary mythology that the forties are the best time of your life. A load of cock, so far as I'm concerned.

One thing old age does is play tricks with time. Time

Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule. I

He sees that time is what we live in, but that it is also what we carry within us. Time is then, but it is also our own perpetual now.

Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad of Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water.

She asks to hold the baby, and enjoys the feel of her solid little body, new-minted, ready to grow and to go. She thinks of her own, which is time visible. She is walking proof that time is real, time exists, she is a demonstration of the power of time. And this is a story that will indeed end. But not for a while, she thinks, not for a while.

Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

When a thing's happened to you it's no good shoving it away and pretending it hasn't. You can go off your head that way.' 'Battles?' 'Not just battles,' said Bill with a snort. 'Most of us don't get mixed up with battles, do we? Anything. Everything.' Everything? 'It's what you do about things that makes you the kind of bloke you are,' said Bill.

You think back. And often it seems more real than now. I mean, here I am, like this, but in my mind it's like I was different. Young, you see. You never really believe you're not anymore.

What we have read makes us what we are – quite as much as what we have experienced and where we have been and who we have known. To read is to experience.

Calm down, she tells herself. Just because this has never happened to you before. Because you have reached the ripe age of thirty-one without knowing this peculiar derangement. For derangement is what it surely is; only by stern physical effort can she keep herself from looking at him, touching him.

Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.

But you are not sure it is possible to outgrow the things that have built you from nothing into something.

We enter this world with birth pains and we leave with similar pains of death.

Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear. --The book of Disquiet

Living is in itself dying because every new day we enjoy is another day of our lives lost.

Like history, experience of life teaches us nothing. True experience consists in reducing one's contact with reality whilst at the same time intensifying one's analysis of that contact.

It has often been said that the more unusual the murder the easier it is to solve, but this is a theory I don't believe. Nothing is easy, nothing is simple, and you should think of your investigations as a complicated experiment: look at what remains constant and look at what changes, ask the right questions and don't be afraid of wrong answers, and above all rely on observation and rely on experience.

What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?

Sooner or later everyone disguises themselves and where they have been and what they have done.