Quotes About Experience

BETWEEN BIRTH AND BURIAL, WE FIND OURSELVES in a comedy of mysteries. If

From birth to death we explore and seek, and in the end we arrive where we started, the past having made one great slow turn on a carousel to become our future, and if we have learned anything worth learning, the carousel will bring us to the one place we most need to be.

Chronologically she is twelve but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.

It's only life. We all get through it. Not all of us complete the journey in the same condition. Along the way, some lose their legs or eyes in accidents or altercations, while others skate through years with nothing worse to worry about than an occasional bad-hair day.

Sorrow might have grown into depression if he had been a less positive person, but his lifelong experience was that every spell of darkness lifted soon enough, so that light came again into the soul and mind and heart, which were not made for darkness.

Her stare was direct and unwavering, full of confidence earned from painful experience...

I'd had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence.

If an eighty-six-year-old woman has been clear-seeing from a young age, she will have gone through a lot of life developing a keen eye for snares and pitfalls, an ear for deceit, and a good nose for knavery. And by such an age, a smart woman with no illusions is one to whom courage comes far more readily than it does to those young people who don't yet know the world for what it is.

That's life. Always something, more good than bad, but always interesting if you're paying attention.

Even the wisest and the best of us can be foolish occasionally.

Amazement and astonishment express the momentary overwhelming of the mind by something beyond expectation. Amazement is an emotional response, astonishment an intellectual one.

I'm serious,' he said, though aware of how odd it was that he should choose to inform his wife of a personal crisis by comparing it to the experiences of a mystery novel heroine whom he had created. Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it sometimes was for a writer? And if so... was there a book in that idea?

I was learning how people were with one another, how they acted and reacted and interacted, what they said and how they said it, what they wanted, what they hoped for—more than I could learn from books alone.

So many things in my continuing education are learned by going where I have to go and doing what I have to do. Therefore, my only answer is: I guess I'll find out.

I understood for the first time why music matters so much, how it reminds us of who we are and where we came from, of all the good times and the sadness, too.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I tend to do that. Any life isn't just one story; it's thousands of them. So when I try to tell one of my own, I sometimes go down an alleyway when I should take the main street, or if the story is fourteen blocks long, I sometimes start on block four and have to backtrack to make sense.

The past was a trove of hard-won wisdom.

Toda vida es una novela. La escribimos a medida que la vivimos.

She's not seen it a tenth this bright on any previous night.

He said, "Sometimes it takes a lot of distance to be able to fold a piece of your life into a work of fiction.

was learned from experience, what was intuitively known, and matters of instinct coded in the genes.

Plain, homely women like you and me will never lead a glamorous life, never go to exotic places. So books have a special value to us. We can experience most everything vicariously, through books. This isn't bad. Living through books is even better than having friends and knowing... men.

emotionally, intellectually, psychologically, chronologically, and now even geographically

she reacts to the impact not as if it might damage the vessel, but as if it is a thrill she'd happily pay for if this were a carnival ride.