Quotes About Experience

How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.

careful aperçus about tennis bums and failed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taught me a significant lesson (a lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for ourselves) by asking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchid-filled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it was snowing outside.

I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself.

We all have our own trips and it is a nice drive.

I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later - because I did not belong there, did not come from there - but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more.

You can get high on a mantra, he says, but I'm holy on acid.

Everyone was younger then, and in the telling a certain glow suffuses those years.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we've learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

By 'the long view' I believe she meant history. Or more exactly, the particular undertow of having and not having, the convulsions of a world largely unaffected by the individual efforts of anyone in it, that Inez's experience had tended to deny.

I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty or twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

Life is limited, but by writing, and reading, we can live in different worlds, get inside the skins and minds of other people, and, in this way, push out the boundaries of our own lifes.

I like every part of growing older except what happens to your feet. Written by Avis DeVoto to Julia Child in As Always, Julia

My, I get so depressed after a poor meal; that's why I can never stay in England for more than a week. Julia to Avis

A story is already over before we hear it. That is how the teller knows what it means.

S]torytelling, in ancient and modern practice, is always a contemplation of the experience of time passing. A story depends on things not standing still, on the built-in condition of impermanence.

Obviously, I had talked too much, recounted too long a list. By that gauge, the years since puberty were peaks and valleys and stretches of incoherent landscape.

It was one of the mysteries of modern life, what happened to old love.

But I think it's useful to note that at any particular point in our lives our minds are full not just of our own memories but of the experiences of characters from the books we've been reading. That's if we are lucky to have the education and leisure to read at all. And the curiosity

The fact is, until we stop doubting God's goodness, we can't experience God's love.

A hot, dry breeze greeted the Swensen sisters and their mother when they emerged from the air-conditioned interior of McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas.

Work. Like pain, I sensed that this was an experience I would want to avoid as often as possible.