Quotes About Experience

You're the kind of child who might develop a passion for Bach. I told him I hadn't at school. The one Bach piece I learnt made me feel I was being repeatedly hit on the head with a teaspoon.

Is it wrong for me to feel so happy? Perhaps I ought even to feel guilty? No. I didn't make it happen, and it can't hurt anyone but me. Surely I have a right to my joy. For as long as it lasts...

Vicar: You ought to try [religion], one of these days, he said. I believe you'd like it. I said: but I have tried it, haven't I? I've been to church. It never seems to take.

The one Bach piece I learnt made me feel I was being repeatedly hit on the head with a teaspoon

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

I am not so sure I should like the facts of life, but I have got over the bitter disappointment I felt when I first heard about them, and one obviously has to try them sooner or later.

extreme happiness invites religion almost as much as extreme misery.

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it – or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.

Earth. We, in this physical body, don't have to be negative. We can be positive. And when we know love and give love, we experience what is beyond this world. We need to know we're spiritual, we're balanced.

No perfection... more experience. As soon as you reach perfection it is not perfect anymore because you want to try something different.

Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.

I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation.

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I'm not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

To be a tourist is to escape accountability.

There are no amateurs in the world of children.

As though in her heart she was not a travel writer at all, as her mother had said she wished to be, but simply a traveler, in the purer form, someone who collects impressions, dense anatomies of feeling, but does not care to record them.

She was the one, I decided, who would guide me into the vortex of the cliche.

He'd come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain.

Sometimes it takes an entire morning to outlive a dream, to outwake a dream.

What was the barn like before it was photographed?' he said. 'What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can't answer these questions because we've read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now.

This is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about them.

I've bought these peanuts before. They're round, cubical, pock-marked, seamed. Broken peanuts. A lot of dust at the bottom of the jar. But they taste good. Most of all I like the packages themselves. You were right, Jack. This is the last avant-garde. Bold new forms. The power to shock.