Quotes About Experience

I am made of memories

Is there a moment that a heart cracks?

Did he know how much those words cost me? I do not think he could. It is youth's gift not to feel its debts.

Living with him was like standing beside the sea. Each day a different color,

When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world

Have you no memories?" 'I am made of memories.

Lorsque nous sommes jeunes, nous croyons être les premiers au monde à ressentir chaque sentiment.

They have wrinkles, but no wisdom.

Did he know how much those words cost me? I do not think he could. It was youth's gift not to feel its debts.

In the old days I would have rushed forth with a brimming cup of answers, to give him all he wanted. But I was not the same as I had been.

She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl's wings and talons and became other than conscious.

The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now.

He thought, as the locked truck slid and hit: Too much time staring at the pretty girl, Cherrik. Too much dreaming. Too old, Cherrik. Too damn old.

There are middle-aged children who spend a part of every day thinking of their college or their war, but the ones who grow up to be men do not have this plaintive need for a flavor of past importance, and Callowell was one of these.

There had been a slight flavor of childishness in her outbursts, a little of petulance, but it was mostly a mature woman in that special area of pain reserved, in irony, for those who know how to give.

We are all at the mercy of the hostility of the service industry.

In my experience, John D. MacDonald, the man, was as kind and thoughtful as his fiction would lead you to believe that he must be. That a writer's work accurately reflects his soul is a rarer thing than you might imagine, but in his case, the reflection is clear and true. For that reason, it has been a special honor, in fact a grace, to be asked to write this introduction.

What you feel good after one time, you feel rotten after the next. And it is difficult to know in advance. And morality shouldn't be experimental, I don't think.

John D. MacDonald

Aint no good place to look for a job, young feller. . . . There's jobs all right. . . . I'll be sixty-five years old in a month and four days an I've worked sence I was five I reckon, an I aint found a good job yet.

Emile, you're a goodlooking fellow and steady and you'll get on in the world. . . . But I'll never put myself in a man's power again. . . . I've suffered too much. . . . Not if you came to me with five thousand dollars.

Not Heaven itself upon the past has power, But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Memory relates to ethics as well as to spirituality (the distinction between ethics and spirituality is a Western one and does more harm than good). Memory places obligations upon you. The Israelites were to remember their experience of servitude in Egypt, and treat their servants accordingly.

His whole life long, even in those few moments when he had experienced some inkling of satisfaction, contentment, and perhaps even happiness, he had preferred exhaling to inhaling—just as he had begun life not with a hopeful gasp for air but with a bloodcurdling scream.