Quotes About Experience

Now Sentimental Education doesn't read as if Flaubert was having fun; Letter to His Father doesn't read as if Kafka was having fun; The Sorrows of Young Werther sure as hell doesn't read as if Goethe was having fun. Sure, Henry Miller seems like he's having fun, but he had to cross three thousand miles of Atlantic before saying 'cunt'.

It did not matter that the idea made no sense. Sabbath's sixty-four years of life had long ago released him from the falsity of sense.

Of course it should not be too surprising to find out that your life story has included an event, something important, that you have known nothing about – your life story is in and of itself something that you know very little about.

Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.

La vejez no es una batalla; la vejez es una masacre.

Dottor Spielvogel, questa è la mia vita, la mia unica vita, e la sto vivendo da protagonista di una barzelletta ebraica! Io sono il figlio in una barzelletta ebraica… solo che non è affatto una barzelletta!

But what affords the one with happiness affords the other with disgust. The interplay, the ridiculous interplay, enough to kill all and everyone

No one gets through unmarked by brooding, grief, confusion, and loss. Even those who had it all as kids sooner or later get the average share of misery, if not sometimes more.

Everyone knows' is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All the we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

Play the moment, play whatever plays for you in that moment, and then go to the next moment. It doesn't matter where you're going. Don't worry about that. Just take it moment, moment, moment, moment.

Rimane il fatto che, in ogni modo, capire la gente non è vivere. Vivere è capirla male, capirla male e male e poi male e, dopo un attento riesame, ancora male. Ecco come sappiamo di essere vivi: sbagliando. Forse la cosa migliore sarebbe dimenticare di aver ragione o torto sulla gente e godersi semplicemente la gita. Ma se ci riuscite... Beh, siete fortunati.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach—that it makes no sense.

What a paradox. Well, you can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.

Fiction's about what it is to be a f*****g human being.

Each man, passing through his department's hall, felt the special subsonic disquiet the overtime executive in topcoat and unfresh suit and loosened tie feels as he moves in nighttime through areas meant to be experienced in, and as, daytime.

the same Celebrity Cruises brain trust responsible for the wildly seductive brochure has decided to make certain elements of pre-embarkation as difficult and unpleasant as possible in order to sharpen the favorable contrast between real life and the 7NC experience.

The sun, if your fluttering eye catches it even slightly, gives you the blue and red floaters a flashbulb gives you.

Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything's pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that others experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics.

Now – those who got it right. On the count of three, I'd like you to sit down if you'd seen the question before. 1, 2, 3!"  Everyone who was standing sits down. This gets a huge laugh. The students who got the answer wrong suddenly feel much better about their mistake: in a Harvard class, not a single person got it right unless they had seen it before.

In every one of us is the total of all we have ever been, the sullen child, the arrogant youth, the suckling babe. Every fear endured in childhood is lodged somewhere in here.' He tapped his temple. 'And every act of heroism or cowardice, generosity or meanness of spirit.

The truth? What the Hell is the truth? We're born, we live and we die. Everything else is just shades of opinion.

We are not made for life at all, old horse. It is made for us. We live it. We leave it.

I choose to pay. I am cursed with a staff a stallion would be proud of. It takes an experienced woman to accept it. There are even some whores who hide when they see me coming.

But remember this: to have may be taken from you, to have had never.