Quotes About Experience

when the moon hours lengthen, human beings come adrift from the regularity of their mechanical clocks. They nod at noon, dream in waking hours, open their eyes wide to the pitch-black night. It is a time of magic. And as the borders between night and day stretch to their thinnest, so too do the borders between worlds. Dreams and stories merge with lived experience, the dead and the living brush against each other in their comings and goings, the past and the present touch and overlap.

We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. "I know," he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

And is it better to know?" he asked me. "I can't tell you. But once you know, it's impossible to go back.

Don't you think one can tell the truth much better with a story?

Imagine the time it would take if every aspect of experience had to be scrutinized afresh every minute of every day. No; in order to free ourselves from the mundane it is essential that we delegate much of our interpretation of the world to that lower area of the mind that deals with the presumed, the assumed, the probable.

Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you?

half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could feel so much and not die of it.

for on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived.

And is it better to know? he asked me. I can't tell you. But once you know, it's impossible to go back.

And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child.

The pleasure of sitting down to a good meal is not limited to just eating what's set in front of you. It can also be about the sensations or memories associated with it.

I gazed at him. He was old enough to know that few things were fair. Most five-year-olds had already discovered it.

I never learned hate at home or shame. I had to go to school for that.

I was learning that just being a Negro doesn't qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.

How can the intensity of this shame be understood by those who have never experienced it? How can they understand the strength of the motivations produced by the desire to escape from it?

Toma de la vida todo lo que te dé, sea lo que sea, siempre que te interese y te pueda dar cierto placer.

My job is not to just set down events that happened to me. My job is to create an experience for a reader." —Mary Karr

Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words.

It is not the job of writers to lift our spirits. Books simply do what they do. They sometimes confirm the capricious drama of a childhood living room. When you think that you are in the grace of a dance you come upon something hard. ?—A Map to the Door of No Return - Dionne Brand

I know all about the facts of life, and I don't think much of them.

While I have been writing I have lived in the past, the light of it has been all around me...

I don't want to miss anything.

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing a book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it.

Simon: You always were wise beyond your years. Cassandra: No I wasn't. I used to be consciously naive.