Quotes About Experience

It's not lost on me that I'm so busy recording life, I don't have time to really live it.

You haven't lived until you've sailed

the lower bunks, both of us longing to be pinned. "You kids think you invented sex," my mother was fond of saying. But hadn't we? With no instruction manual or federally enforced training period, didn't we all come away feeling we'd discovered something unspeakably modern?

Sometimes, when I find it hard to sleep, I'll think of when we first met, of the newness of each other's body, and my impatience to know everything about this person. Looking back, I should have taken it more slowly, measured him out over the course of fifty years rather than cramming him in so quickly.

Fly enough, and you learn to go brain-dead when you have to. It's sort of like time travel. One minute you're bending to unlace your shoes,and the next thing you know you're paying fourteen dollars for a fruit cup, wondering, How did I get here?

Though harsh in other respects, prison would be an excellent place to learn a foreign language - total immersion, and you'd have the new slang before it even hit the streets.

Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.

I need to touch the person's head again. Experience has taught me that you can do this three times before the head's owner either yells at you or rings for the flight attendant.

David Sedaris

Whereas our other grandparents asked what grade we were in or which was our favorite ashtray, Ya Ya never expressed any interest in that sort of thing. Childhood was something you endured until you were old enough to work, and money was the only thing that mattered.

Now here we were, the shadows lengthening, our spaghetti growing cold, as he hit the half-hundred mark, then blithely sailed beyond it. Whore.

In the beginning, I was put off by the harshness of German. Someone would order a piece of cake, and it sounded as if it were an actual order, like, "Cut the cake and lie facedown in that ditch between the cobbler and the little girl.

On Maui, one November, Hugh and I went swimming, and turned to find a gigantic sea turtle coming up between us. As gentle as a cow she was, and with a cow's dopey, almost lovesick expression on her face. That, to me, was worth the entire trip, worth my entire life, practically. For to witness majesty, to find yourself literally touched by it—isn't that what we've all been waiting for?

And there's no point in me doing anything if I can't write about it," I continued. "It would be like . . . walking ten miles without my Fitbit on—a complete waste. I mean, I do do things I don't write about: I use the bathroom, I have sex, but I try to be quick about it.

That's the thing with a diary, though. In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it. Not at your desk, but beyond it. Out in the world where it's so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it.

At around five, I took the L home. A woman near me had a three-year-old child on her lap, a girl, who looked at me and said, "Mommy, I hate that man.

Out in the world where it's so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it.

I used to get them all the time. Then I met a woman who told me I needed to put a bar of soap in my bed. I don't know why it works, but it does!

I've finished answering the letters Alyssa gave me a few weeks back. One was from a woman who wrote that when deaf people get their hearing, they're always surprised that the sun makes no noise. They naturally assumed it would roar, though if it did, you'd think it might have been mentioned somewhere along the way, in songs at least. Maybe that's what they thought was meant by "I was awoken by the sun.

As a business traveler, you'll likely be met at your destination by someone who asks, "So, how was your flight?" This, as if there are interesting variations and you might answer, "The live orchestra was a nice touch," or "The first half was great, but then they let a baby take over the controls and it got all bumpy." In fact, there are only two kinds of flights: ones in which you die and ones in which you do not.

It was as if I'd learned to grieve by watching television:

Some of my additions to the list were things that Ronnie wasn't familiar with. "We're all going to the same place," for instance. This is what novice fliers in group five say when they get caught trying to board with group two. Sure, we're all headed to St. Louis. The difference is that some people (me) are going to find room in the overhead bins and others (you) are not.

My Yiayiá was exactly the sort of friend I'd liked as an adult, someone with an endless supply of hard-luck stories and no desire to ever write a book.

It is not unpleasant to hold someone else's warm teeth in your hand...