Quotes About Experience

When Flora was a young girl she used to try to "fix" moments in her memory. The notion that years of her life would pass and she would only remember snippets, seconds of the whole, distressed her. She came up with a plan and at various times-walking home from school or out with friends or just sitting at her desk she would think: This. Remember this.

In some inexplicable way she'd been looking forward to it and all its attendant drama, because wasn't there something nearly lovely—when you were young enough—about guts churning and tear ducts being put to glorious overuse?

He had nothing against cherry tomatoes except that any attempt to cut them shot them off the plate with a velocity that could lay out a gemsbok at fifty paces, and putting them in the mouth whole and biting down was a not entirely pleasant experience that could result in doing the nose trick with tomato seeds.

It is true that William Blake said that "The Road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom," but they didn't have angel dust back then.

I feel that between my experience and my mother's, breast cancer is a little bit like someone who lives next door. I know what that person looks like and what their daily habits are.

Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

But what was wanted—what was wanted for Mrs. Mitwisser—was simply Story: a story about men and women free of history, except their own.

James (like the far more visceral Conrad) seizes your life.

This is what travelers discover: that when you sever the links of normality and its claims, when you break off from the quotidian, it is the teapots that truly shock.

I felt that the world itself had changed and that it would never be steady under my feet again. I felt I understood nothing of people and had no way to learn. I felt fear. Until you have felt fear, you cannot imagine it. Once you have really felt it, you know that all your earlier nervousness was but a pale shadow.

You made a lot of mistakes, and you wrote a lot of crap. But it was all part of the learning process.

I do not know how to hold all the beauty and sorrow of my life.

We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.

Young writers if they are to mature require a period of between three and seven years in which to live down their promise. Promise is like the mediaeval hangman who after settling the noose, pushed his victim off the platform and jumped on his back, his weight acting a drop while his jockeying arms prevented the unfortunate from loosening the rope. When he judged him dead he dropped to the ground.

You know, sir," he said, "she was easily the nicest woman I ever knew." Sampson suppressed a smile. It was funny to hear a boy of seventeen talk like that. All the same, he reflected, the lad might live to seventy and still find no reason to change his opinion.

I mostly believe, deep in my bones, that life is very simply beyond description; regardless of what one makes of it, life always spills over the parameters of how anyone has chosen to define it.

What does it mean to write a story of your own life in your head? We all do that whether we are writers or not. We all have a story about who we are: what gender we are, what experiences we have . . . all sorts of stories and narratives we allow ourselves to believe in and create as we go along.

It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.

Since that moment when in a house with low eaves A doctor from the town cut the navel-string And pears dotted with white mildew Reposed in their nests of luxurious weeds I have been in the hands of humans.

Es posible que no haya otra memoria que la memoria de las heridas».

If I had to tell what the world is for me I would take a hamster or a hedgehog or a mole and place him in a theatre seat one evening and, bringing my ear close to his humid snout, would listen to what he says about the spotlights, sounds of the music, and movements of the dance.

For instance, despite all our knowledge, we still associate the word "journey" with separation and speed.

For to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name.