Quotes About Experience

He could add something to the list of things you weren't supposed to do. Don't get hurt, don't get dirty, don't get drunk, don't get scared, don't count on it. You ended up doing all of them.

Can't run from hurt, Rose. You might miss some hurt, but you'll also miss all the joys of livin'.

When poachers target the matriarchs or older females—as they often do, because older elephants usually have larger tusks—they also destroy that lifetime of learning and knowledge. For an elephant family, the death of a matriarch must feel like losing an encyclopedia, or an entire library—and for us, the loss makes stopping the poaching even more urgent, if only to protect the experienced matriarchs, who keep their families out of harm's way.

One learns more,' she said to me one day, 'talking to ignorant people about their own affairs, than in addressing oneself to

felt the sting of rejection.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book shown to him by heart, and his friends can only read the title.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Pero, en mi corta experiencia, los clientes estaban llenos de humanidad, de fragilidad, de angustia. Y eso, después, se te queda pegado como un remordimiento.

People who have kids are constantly boring the shit out of people who haven't. But they can't stand it if you tell them the truth – when I look at your life it makes me want to do anything but.

Il ne va pas crever tout seul. La petite innocente jolis yeux, il va lui montrer d'un seul coup, à quoi ressemble son monde à lui.

And that unconscious ease that comes of being so young — still oblivious to the blows that will destroy parts of her. Past the age of forty, everyone is like a bombed-out city.

Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong Kong.

Indeed, it is amazing that a religion was founded on the experience of utter shame, of a god that dies the death of a condemned criminal.

It is practice first and knowledge afterwards.

Plunge into the world, and then, after a time, when you have suffered and enjoyed all that is in it, will renunciation come; then will calmness come.

The old sorceress was not given to berating herself herself, but she could not help but think she had made a mistake. Possibly the worst of her whole life.

The presence in a memoir or an essay of the truth speaker - the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience - it was about this alone that I felt I had something to say; and it was to those works in which such a narrator comes through strong and clear that I was invariably drawn.

Between what we know and what we cannot hope to know about how we come to be as we are lies an emotional dumping ground into which exceptional writers pour all the art they are capable of making.

I had an affair with a downtown playwright. Two things about this man: He was an ex-alcoholic, and he was phobic about leaving the city. I was too old to think him poetic, but I did.

We loved once, and we loved badly. We loved again, and again we loved badly. We did it a third time, and we were no longer living in a world free of experience. We saw that love did not make us tender, wise, or compassionate. Under its influence we gave up neither our fears nor our angers. Within ourselves we remained unchanged. The development was an astonishment: not at all what had been expected. The atmosphere became charged with revelation, and it altered us permanently as a culture.

Arthur is smart and he has words, but so do I. I stood there arguing with him. Then, in the middle of a sentence, he said sharply, "I'll decide when the vacation is over." I stared at him. I don't know what he saw in my face, but his own softened perceptibly. Very quietly he said, "It doesn't mean what it meant when you were young.