Quotes About Experience

stamps, paintings—not least of all because he was eighty-nine and had spent his life learning.

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. When

I have had successes but also failures, because whatever else I might be, I am first and foremost human, and the tendency of our fallen kind is to fall again.

A fear that makes you shrink from the prospect of any further such experience is matched by a compulsion to see more and to understand.

To speak of the past, to describe her ordeal, she has nothing but words, and words are insufficient to the task; mere words will reduce the sacred to tabloid-newspaper sensationalism. And then she'll have nothing.

I wish I could believe in reincarnation," I said. "Not me. Once down the track is enough of a test. Pass me or fail me, Dear Lord, but don't make me go through high school again.

you were incarnate as yourself in numerous timelines, living many lives.

When you grow up, Jonah, women are gonna break your heart so often, you lose count.

But personal safety at the expense of others was cowardice, and cowardice was a right only of small children who lacked the strength and experience to defend themselves.

You could live a thousand lives through stories—and learn to shape your own life into a story of the best kind.

calm and sane. The key words of the Japanese experience, at least for most of its philosophical history, are "serenity" and "simplicity".

If this is a lonely life, it is also colorful.

In one of his psychology classes, he'd been taught that, as a person lay dying

MY LIFE BEFORE JACOB'S LADDER, ISLAND LIFE, LITERATURE, and PARANORMAL

Needless to say, I had not enjoyed such an exhilarating dream in decades.

have learned a great deal from novels. Some of it is even true.

Yeah, life is complicated, but if it wasn't complicated, it would be a roller coaster on a flat track. Wouldn't be a ride worth taking. And, yeah, we never fully know ourselves, but that means we're mysterious enough to interest one another. And if we fully knew ourselves in this world, what reason would we have to still be here?

Progress was real progress only when it evolved naturally and thoughtfully from the history of human experience and accumulated wisdom. When it was imposed in contempt for that experience and wisdom, then progress was in fact radical destruction

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

Fiftyish, with a thickening waist and thinning blond hair, he had the weary look of a man who'd seen more death than he had bargained for when the romance of the healer's profession had long ago lured him into medical school.

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 an 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 delusions 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.

Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it's probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it's like to be that lobster in the pot, that's in poetry too.

Our pain can be our greatest teacher. It leads us to places we'd never go on our own.

We all make mistakes. The key is learning from those mistakes and not repeating them.