Quotes About Experience

Nobody has the right to remove any single experience from another. Life and death are promised. We have a right to pain.

I'm tired of people who have not been at war who know all about it.

During the dry years, the people forgot about the rich years, and when the wet years returned, they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

The land is so much more than its analysis.

Well, Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.

But you can't start over, Only a baby can start over. You and me, Why, we're all that's been.

I shall tell them this story against the background of the county I grew up in and along the river I know and do not love very much. For I have discovered that there are other rivers.

The story was gradually taking shape. Pilon liked it this way. It ruined a story to have it all come out quickly. The good story lay in half-told things which must be filled in out of the hearer's own experience.

I eat stories like grapes.

Go through the motions, Adam." "What motions?" "Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.

We don't take a trip. A trip takes us.

At the roadsides I never had a really good dinner or a really bad breakfast.

Hazel grew up - did four years in grammar school, four years in reform school, and didn't learn a thing in either place. Reform schools are supposed to teach viciousness and criminality but Hazel didn't pay enough attention.

The reverse is also true: many a trip continues long after movement in time and space has ceased. I remember a man in Salinas who in his middle years traveled to Honolulu and back, and that journey continued for the rest of his life. We could watch him in his rocking chair on his front porch, his eyes squinted, half-closed, traveling to Honolulu.

I've lived in a good climate, and it bores the hell out of me.

For it is not true that an uneventful time in the past is remembered as fast. On the contrary, it takes the time-stones of events t give a memory past dimension. Eventlessness collapses time.

For how can one know colour in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased. I remember a man in Salinas who in his middle years traveled to Honolulu and back, and that journey continued for the rest of his life. We could watch him in his rocking chair on his front porch, his eyes squinted, half-closed, endlessly traveling to Honolulu.

Within that frame he went a long way and burned a deep scar.

A day, a livelong day, is not one thing but many.

I ain't gonna try to teach 'em nothin'. I'm gonna try to learn.

It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased

Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?