Quotes About Experience

I cleared my throat of a sour taste, the gastric reflux of my confused Oriental and Occidental insides.

B]ooks mean something different when return to them later, leavened with age.

while pain is universal, it is also utterly private.

To avoid talking, we both smoked incessantly and listened to a greatest hits tape of Johnny Hallyday, the sonic equivalent of Ricard Pastis, a taste the rest of the world could not acquire.

Becoming stupider was a consequence of age for which he was unprepared. With

If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth?...Let me propose that truth, or some measure of it, can be found in these youthful follies that we forget, to our loss, as adults.

Except for him, most of our fellow exiles had been shrunken by their experience, either absolutely through the aforementioned maladies of migration, or relatively, surrounded by Americans so tall they neither looked through nor looked down on these newcomers. They simply looked over them.

Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven't lived through one yet.

I've tried love," Louis said, as if it were a kind of soft, malodorous French cheese.

You don't have to make something that people call art. Living is an artistic activity, there is an art to getting through the day.

We all experience many freakish and unexpected events - you have to be open to suffering a little. The philosopher Schopenhauer talked about how out of the randomness, there is an apparent intention in the fate of an individual that can be glimpsed later on. When you are an old guy, you can look back, and maybe this rambling life has some through-line. Others can see it better sometimes. But when you glimpse it yourself, you see it more clearly than anyone.

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.

Golf is about knowledge, and studying another player - more than listening to a teacher - is the best way to get it.

And I realized again that real life is different from reel life.

Train journeys are about possibilities. They denote a change in state. When you arrive, you are no longer the same person who departed.

There is some pleasure even in pain. A sweet ecstasy.

a rainy day ceases to have meaning for a person who has lived in the open under a monsoon cloud most of his life.

Maybe this was why people had kids, so that when you could no longer travel with your parents, your children made all train trips new again.

Strange to be a man and never grow big with child. To feel a part of you opening, and a part of you leaving, and howling as if it were not a part of you.

I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.

What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go.

And the process of reading is such a private one. I once came into a room where a friend of mine was reading one of my books, and he clicked his tongue impatiently and shooed me off.

A child learns lessons in life more from his unhappy parents than his happy ones.

A man one year elder to you is one cunning year elder to you.