Quotes About Experience

Jessie was trying to read science fiction but nothing she read so far could begin to match ordinary life on this planet, she said, for sheer unimaginableness.

A film can be undermined by the person you're seeing it with, there in the dark, a ripple effect of attitude, scene by scene, shot by shot.

We travel into or away from our photographs.

Self-pity oozed through my soul. I tried to relax and enjoy it.

Stun me. I mean it. Draw the gun and shoot. I want you to do it, Kendra. Show me what it feels like. I'm looking for more. Show me something I don't know. Stun me to my DNA. Come on, do it. Click the switch. Aim and fire. I want the volts the weapon holds. Do it. Shoot it. Now.

This is what long journeys are for. To see what's back behind you, lengthen the view, find the patterns, know the people, consider the significance of one matter or another and then curse yourself or bless yourself or tell yourself, in my father's situation, that you'll have a chance to do it all over again, with variations.

I don't know whether to feel good or bad about learning that my experience is widely shared.' 'Feel bad,' he said.

Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.

Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is here and there, before and after, and he moves from one to the other shatteringly, in a state of collapse, minus an identity, a language, a way to enjoy the savor of the honey-coated toast she watches him eat.

How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process.

I think pleasure is in the moment more than in the thing.

Was he at the movies to see a movie, she said, or maybe more narrowly, more essentially, simply to be at the movies?

The game doesn't change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.

A band played live Muzak.

This is the point of Babette.

The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It's a moment never to be thought of except when it's in the process of unfolding. Maybe this is why it doesn't seem peculiar. It is only me. I don't think about it. I simply live within it and then leave it behind.

This is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.

The only problem I had was that my whole life was a lesson in the effect of echoes, that I was living in the third person.

He told me that I hadn't done anything yet. Hadn't lived yet. All you do is pass the time, he said.

Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.

Vokspapiret ble skilt fra rullen i et rat-a-tat-forløp, krøp langs den hakkete kanten på esken, og hun hørte det nedover ryggraden, tenkte hun.

Steffie took my hand and we walked past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards along one wall. The bins were arranged diagonally and backed my mirrors that people accidentally punched when reaching for fruit in upper rows.

Billy couldn't recall ever having seen a blind man laugh

We can't do justice to our dreams, reworking them in memory. They seem borrowed, part of another life, ours only maybe and only in the farthest margins.