Quotes About Experience

In my previous life I was a civil attorney. At one point I truly believed that was what I wanted to be- but that was before I'd been handed a fistful of crushed violets from a toddler. Before I understood that the smile of a child is a tattoo: indelible art.

Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: some will be blue-based; others red; some will be as stark as Picasso and others as rich as Rembrandt; some will be foreshortened and others distant. Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.

When you have been burned by fire once, you don't leap into the flames again.

You know how I get angry sometimes? That's because it's the only way I can still feel. And I need to test myself, to make sure I'm really here.

Words are like nets - we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder. Like falling in love or finding god, if it ha...ppens to you, you know what it feels like. But try to describe it to someone else - and language only takes you so far.

A girl who is thirteen-which is hard, and difficult, and beautiful, and painful, and exhilarating.

It's like picking up an unfamiliar piece of sheet music & starting to stumble through it, only to realize it is a melody you'd once learned by heart, one you can play without even trying.

I never said I do not remember, my grandmother corrects. I said I prefer to forget.

Life is not a plot; it's in the details.

Just so you know, when they say once upon a time....they're lying. It's not once upon a time. Its not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.

If you want to understand something, you first need to accept the fact of your own ignorance. And then, you need to talk to people who know more than you do, people who have not just thought about the facts, but lived them.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. Søren Kierkegaard

I think that you can love more than one person in a lifetime. There's the one who teaches you what love is, even if it doesn't last. … And then there's the one who makes you a better human than you were, even as you do the same form him. … And then there's the last one ... The one that you never get enough time with. But who sees you through to the end.

Babies don't come with instruction booklets. You'd learn the same way we all do -- you'd read up on dinosaurs, you'd Google backhoes and skidders. And you don't need a penis to go buy a baseball glove.

What being home-schooled has taught me, more than anything, is what a waste of a life high school is.

Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others.

This is what it means to be human. We are all just canvases for our scars.

If I have gained anything over these months, it is the knowledge there is no starting over - only living with the mistakes you've made.

What one person takes away from a book might be very different from what the next person takes away -- almost as if the story is altered depending on who's reading, where, and when. But then, maybe all books are like that -- a little different each time they are opened. The real question is who's doing the changing: the story, or the reader.

There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots s there are in the bright ones.

you never forget your first fall.

I believe that you can fall in love many times with many different people. However, I don't think that you can fall in love the same way twice. One type of relationship may be steady. Another may be fire and brimstone. Who is to say if one of these is better that the other? The deciding factor is how it all fits together. Your love, I mean, and your life.

if i have gained anything over these months, it is the knowledge there is no starting over - only living with the mistakes you've made. but then, caleb taught me long ago you can't build anything without some sort of foundation. maybe we learn to live our lives by understanding, firsthand, how not to live them.

There is a reason history has, at its heart, the narrative of one's life.