Quotes About Experience

Don't aim for perfection. Evolution, and life, only happen through mistakes.

MINDS ARE UNIQUE. They go wrong in unique ways. My mind went wrong in a slightly different way to how other minds go wrong. Our experience overlaps with other people's, but it is never exactly the same experience.

Regrets ignore chronology. They float around.

It's okay to be the teacup with a chip in it. That's the one with a story.

People place so much value on thought, but feeling is as essential. I want to read books that make me laugh and cry and fear and hope and punch the air in triumph. I want a book to hug me or grab me by the scruff of my neck. I don't even mind if it punches me in the gut. Because we are here to feel.

Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

New technology, on Earth, just means something you will laugh at in five years. Value the stuff you won't laugh at in five years. Like love. Or a good poem. Or a song. Or the sky.

To know which path to take, it helps to take a few wrong ones.

The world exists in you. Your experience of the world isn't this objective unchangeable thing called 'The World'. No. Your experience of the world is your interaction with it, your interpretation of it. To a certain degree we all make our own worlds. We read it in our own way. But also: we can, to a degree, choose what to read. We have to work out what about the world makes us feel sad or scared or confused or ill or calm or happy.

This, I soon discovered, was a typical pub. The 'pub' was an invention of humans living in England, designed as compensation for the fact that they were humans living in England.

One life of sadness was enough. What is the point of risking more?

I was already feeling a kind of homesickness for a present I was still living

He wrote me a prescription for more diazepam and advised I take things "one day at a time," as if there were another way for days to be experienced.

For decades and decades and decades I have bemoaned people who say they feel old, but I now realise it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher.

And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live.

It might be a strange irony that the cure for worrying about ageing is sometimes, well, ageing .

I've never had a coconut chilli Martini before,' I tell him. 'That's the thing with getting older. You run out of new things to try.' 'Oh, I don't know,' he says, still the optimist. 'I have lived beside one ocean or another most of my life and I have yet to see the same wave twice. It's the mana, you see. It's everywhere. It's never still. It keeps the world new. The whole planet is a coconut chilli Martini.

I have been so many different people, played so many different roles in my life. I am not a person. I am a crowd in one body. I was people I hated and people I admired. I was exciting and boring and happy and infinitely sad.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.' Experience surrounds innocence and innocence can never be regained once lost.

But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.

The best way to think of the ageing process in relation to a human face is to imagine a map of an area of innocent land which slowly becomes a city with many long and winding routes.

So, you see? Sometimes regrets aren't based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .' She searched for the appropriate term and found it. 'A load of bullshit.

What you learn when you are ill, about what hurts, can then be applied to the better times, too. Pain is one hell of a teacher.

Language gives us the power to voice our experience, to reconnect with the world, and to change our own and other people's lives