Quotes About Experience

Does the poem reside in experience or in self-consciousness about experience?

We live the stories we tell; the stories we don't tell live us.

We don't have a good vocabulary for these experiences. They come in variations and degrees, from a slight apprehension of the strangeness of being to the ravishing dissolution of boundaries called enlightenment. A mystical experience, a peak experience, a blurring or merge between self and other, a liberation from the limits of space and time.

Those lists of men in Whitman's papers--a collector's catalog, a record of the body's travels? How else will I know the world, if not by touching as much of it as possible, finding in the bodies of my lovers and fellows my coordinates?

extremely difficult for the average person to visualize a space of more than three dimensions, since that is the only spatial geometry with which we have had any personal experience.

The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough.

Steven] King is an entertainment. King is a diversion. But when you try to take him as a guide to life, he won't work. The circles he draws on the deep are weak and irresolute. And this is so in part because King...is a sentimental writer. In his universe, the children...are good, right, just and true.... But bring this way of seeing the world out into experience and you'll pretty quickly pay for it. Your relation to large quadrants of experience...will likely be paranoid and fated to fail....

The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough. He reads not to see the world through the eyes of other people but effectively to become other people.

How did the students respond to being treated like customers? They didn't seem to mind at all. From what one could see, they loved it.

This was life, really lived, a passage of magic that would flash before our eyes when we died. And to share it, to live through these experiences together, meant that Laura and I were closer than ever.

A traveller learns more than a passenger.

Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body. But rather, to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up,totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming .... WOW what a ride.

WILL'S RULES FOR LIVING #13: READ BOOKS TO GET SMARTER. READ PEOPLE TO BECOME WISER.

But what the measured prose of psychiatrists and the carefully calculated statistics of social scientists rarely capture is the experience of inner struggle. These "significant changes" do not occur automatically. In fact, they must often fight against our resistance. In this sense, midlife is a drama more worthy of a playwright than a scholar. We are characters in the play, caught at the opening of the second act, and we do not know what will happen next.

If you want to change your stereotypes, seek first-hand experience. Do not believe everything you are told. Find out for yourself. Talk

went to Smith.

The customer is sometimes wrong. —HERB KELLEHER, FORMER CHAIRMAN AND CEO, SOUTHWEST AIRLINES

But the goal is not to replace what cannot be replaced, or duplicate what cannot be duplicated, but simply to create opportunities for new memories. One

Since self-defeating behavior goes back to the childhood experience of being alone and defenseless, it is easier to overcome it in adulthood if you get support from other people. The actual role your helpers play doesn't matter. They can assist you directly, provide moral support or agree to hold you accountable for the changes you vow to make. What's important is that you know you're not alone. This will strengthen your confidence and determination.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. —BILL GATES, MICROSOFT CHAIRMAN

But I am bored by Casanovas, inveterate travelers, nature lovers, and the drug-obsessed, as they speak from the narrowness of their exhaustive experience of one thing.

What they failed to teach you at school was that the whole business of being human just got messier and more complicated as you got older. You could tell the truth, be polite, take everyone's feelings into consideration and still have to deal with other people's shit. At nine or ninety.

Everything was shit & everything was beautiful. They were both hunted by the dead.

I never would've thought seeing a hundred naked people around a swimming pool would have been dullsville, but it is.