Quotes About Experience

Most adults assume that the feelings of adolescence don't count, somehow, and that those searing passions of rage and hate and embarrassment and horror and hopeless, abject love are something your grow out of, something hormonal, a practice run for the Real Thing. It wasn't. At 13 *everything* counts; there are sharp edges on everything, and all of them cut.

The advantage of travel is that after a while you begin to realize that wherever you go, most people aren't really all that much different.

We have travelled into the past and returned to find that our present is not quite the same as we left it. Atticus Finch will never again be the white knight we once thought him. And yet the mockingbird still sings — no longer a song of innocence, but maybe one of experience; a song that combines sorrow, forgiveness — and, ultimately, a kind of hope.

But stories are worlds. New worlds for us to visit. In stories, we live forever.

And it is partly the transience of it that delights me; so much loving preparation, so much art and experience, put into a pleasure that can last only a moment, and which only a few will ever fully appreciate.

Anos de viagens com a minha mãe ensinaram-se que a comida é o passaporte universal. Quaisquer que sejam as barreiras de lingua, cultura ou geografia, a comida atravessa todas as fronteiras.

The past is an obdurate stranger that puts as many marks on us as we attempt to impose on it.

My sense of smell seemed preternaturally enhanced, so that I could almost taste every dish- the fish grilled in the ashes of the brazier, the roasted goat's cheese, the dark pancakes and the light, the hot chocolate cake, the confit de canard and the spiced merguez...

The road to adulthood is filled with contradictions, and I was still young enough to half believe the lies with which that road is paved.

The reader wants to be immersed in a story, not drowned in words

To be a woman, I have learnt, is to be the constant recipient of unwanted pieces of male advice.

Bet mano pasaulis yra ?ia. Galb?t jis ir mažas, ta?iau net šimt? met? gyvendamas aš neišsemsiu visos jo begalin?s ?vairov?s.

Leitor ignaro, se não guardas as cartas da juventude, não conhecerás um dia a filosofia das folhas velhas, não gostarás o prazer de ver-te, ao longe, na penumbra, com um chapéu de três bicos, botas de sete léguas e longas barbas assírias, a bailar ao som de uma gaita anacreôntica. Guarda as tuas cartas da juventude!

Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you're young. But I don't think we make any fewer when we're grown up.

Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.

If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?

Do you know how there are moments when the world moves so slowly you can feel your bones shifting, your mind tumbling? When you think that no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you will remember every last detail of that one minute forever?

After all, how many of us had tried to forget something traumatic...only to find it printed on the back of our eyelids, tattooed on our tongues?

What if it turns out that a life isn't defined by who you belong to or where you came from, by what you wished for or whom you've lost, but instead by the moments you spend getting from each of these places to the next?

There are all sorts of experiences we can't really put a name to...The birth of a child, for one. Or the death of a parent. Falling in love. Words are like nets--we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, grief, or wonder. Finding God is like that, too. If it's happened to you, you know what it feels like. But try to describe it to someone else--and language only takes you so far.

One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence.

There is no one truth. There's only what happened, based on how you perceive it.

And oh she had been broken. She hid it well, but Ross knew from personal experience that once you had put the pieces together, even though you might look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall

If you never go out on that limb, you're missing a hell of a view.