Quotes About Experience

We immigrants can sometimes sound a little hysterical about this because we come from places that have tried this and we know where it leads. Anybody who's lived in countries with socialized health care knows that it becomes the dominant political issue.

Abraham Lincoln, a predecessor of Barack Obama in both the White House and the Illinois state legislature, had eighteen months of formal education and became a soldier, surveyor, postmaster, rail-splitter, tavern keeper, and self-taught prairie lawyer. Obama went to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School, and became a "community organizer." I'm not sure that's progress--and it's certainly not "sustainable.

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

Now you invent the boat of your flesh and set it upon the watersand drift in the gradual swell, in the laboring salt.Now you look down. The waters of childhood are there.

A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

You don't read a poem to find the meaning of life. The opposite. I mean, you'd be foolish to. Now, some American poets present the reader with a slice of life, saying, I went to the store today, and I saw a man, and he looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both knew we were … thieves. And aren't we all thieves? You know, this is extracting from everyday experience a statement about life, or a moral.

Will the same day ever come back, and with it Our amazement at having been in it, or will only a dark haze Spread at the back of the mind, erasing events, one after The other, so brief they may have been lost to begin with?

Each moment is a place you've never been.

Each moment is a place you've never been.

Pino shook his head. Mimo was barely sixteen and yet a battle-hardened veteran.

Pino couldn't help thinking that he had just had the best evening of his life at the tail end of the worst day of his life. He'd experienced every emotion possible in a span of twelve hours, from horror to grief to kissing Anna.

I saved myself," Pino whispered. "He kind of came along for the ride.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

I have found out there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them

Iíve seen many troubles in my time, only half of which ever came true

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom.

I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.

The man who carries a cat by the tail learns something that can be learned in no other way.

I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before.

Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.

Don't let schooling interfere with your education.

The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don't tell you what to say.