Quotes About Experience

She's also showing me behavior I've never even heard of, like passenger road rage.

He who devotes sixteen hours a day to hard study may become at sixty as wise as he thought himself at twenty.

When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.

My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there.

painfully curious...about how it feels to fall.

You cannot explain, with the limitations of language and inexperience, why your body can cause such a sudden, fumbling response in someone else, nor can you put into exact words what you feel about your body, explain the thrum it feels in proximity to another warm-skinned form. What you feel is a tangle of contradictions: power, pleasure, fear, shame, exultation, some strange wish to make noise. You cannot say how those things knit themselves together somewhere in the lower abdomen and pulse.

I relish my life. It's the one I have. It's difficult, beautiful, painful, full of laughter, passing strange. Whatever else it is, whatever it brings – it's mine.

The spiritual realm is not the ethereal beyond our lived experience. It is our experience, lived fully and well.

Whether one believes that transformation is effected by the will of an outer force, or the willingness of an inner self, does not change the reality of transformation as a phenomenon of spiritual experience. All we need to know is that it does occur. We have proof of that; we have our living, breathing, ever-expanding spiritual selves.

My most salient memories

The process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained. By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth.

Art is a process, not a product.

Already, with the city behind them, New York didn't feel quite real. As if reality only existed where she existed.

instead I honestly feel lucky sometimes that I have gotten to feel and experience things that others have to struggle longer and harder to learn.

Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading.

the powerful nature of what entering the lives of others can mean for our own lives. Drama makes more visible what each of us does when we pass over in our deepest, most immersive forms of reading. We welcome the Other as a guest within ourselves, and sometimes we become Other. For a moment in time we leave ourselves; and when we return, sometimes expanded and strengthened, we are changed both intellectually and emotionally.

Each of these people has had to deal with illness, death, loneliness, broken marriages, and unrealized dreams. For the most part, they have accepted physical aging gracefully, and each has some way of keeping fit. What they have not accepted is the myth that learning and growing become less possible as one ages.

Listen to the fleshbody," the dropwort retorts. "A mere seventeen turns of the seasons on this ancient earth of ours, and yet he dismisses us.

A lot of people think Japanese food is difficult, a lot of work. But you don't have to buy the knife I have. You don't have to train as long as I have. You can do my cooking in your kitchen.

I've been making sushi for 38 years, and I'm still learning. You have to consider the size and color of the ingredients, how much salt and vinegar to use and how the seasons affect the fattiness of the fish.

Books allowed her vicarious tastes of infinite variety, but they didn't supplant the need to venture out into the big and the messy. In fact, just the opposite. Books convinced her that something more existed---something intuitive, beyond reason---and they whetted her appetite to find it.

If you call failures experiments, you can put them in your resume and claim them as achievements.

Only the broken-hearted know the truth about love.

The wisdom of age: don't stop walking.