Quotes About Experience

This must be a good book," he wrote in Working Days on June 10, 1938. "It simply must. I haven't any choice. It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted—slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge. Until the whole throbbing thing emerges.

But when you get hunted—that's different. Somepin happens to you. You ain't strong; maybe you're fierce, but you ain't strong. I been hunted now for a long time. I ain't a hunter no more. I'd maybe shoot a fella in the dark, but I don't maul nobody with a fence stake no more. It don't do no good to fool you or me. That's how it is.

You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk.

Her full face was not soft; it was controlled, kindly. Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding.

It made him feel alive; he seemed to be living more acutely than at other times.

Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding. She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family

We don't think you're a bad father. Poor things, said Adam. How would you know? You've never had any other kind.

You bastards never owned nothing. You never planted trees an' seen 'em grow an' felt 'em with your own hands, You never owned a thing, never went out an' touched your own apple trees with your hands. What do you know?

A man's mind vagued up a little, for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.

Il vino aggiunge maiuscole e asterischi a un buon racconto... a una storia vera.

think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody. And my life has not been a full orchestra for a long time now. A single note only—and that note unchanging sorrow.

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

Cada viaje, safari o exploración es una entidad, diferente de todos los demás viajes. Tiene personalidad, temperamento, individualidad, carácter único. Un viaje es una persona en sí; no hay dos iguales. Y los planes, las salvaguardas, el control y la coerción son todos infructuosos. Descubrimos tras años de lucha que no hacemos un viaje: nos hace él a nosotros.

Yes, it meant something." Then he said, "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?" "Maybe you're right," said Adam. "It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me," said Lee, "that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.

You should a got a wife," said Joad. "Preacher an' his wife stayed at our place one time. Jehovites they was. Slep' upstairs. Held meetin's in our barnyard. Us kids would listen. That preacher's missus took a god-awful poundin' after ever' night meetin'.

Ci sono tanti mondi, quante sono le giornate.

Y cuando aquella cosecha crecía y luego se segaba, ningún hombre había desmigajado un terrón caliente con sus manos, dejando la tierra cribarse entre las puntas de los dedos; ninguno había palpado la semilla ni anhelado que ésta germinase.

A day, a livelong day, is not one thing but many. It changes not only in growing light toward zenith and decline again, but in texture and mood, in tone and meaning, warped by a thousand factors of season, of heat or cold, of still or multi winds, torqued by odors, tastes, and the fabrics of ice or grass, of bud or leaf or black-drawn naked limbs. As a day changes so do its subjects, bugs and birds, cats, dogs, butterflies and people.

A mother does not become pregnant in order to provide employment to medical people. Giving birth is an ecstatic jubilant adventure not available to males. It is a woman's crowning creative experience of a lifetime.

live your way into the answer.1 —RAINER MARIA RILKE'S ADVICE TO A YOUNG POET

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.