Quotes About Experience

The way out of your mind is via the world.

She is smiling at me. It is a wistful smile. The kind of smile no one is capable of before the age of forty. The kind that contains sadness and defiance and amusement all at once.

it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunize you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can't have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.

Every dead end and cul-de-sac helps us escape the maze. To know which path to take, it helps to take a few wrong ones.

Can I ask you something?" asks Will, after a while. The man sips his whisky instead of answering. Will asks the question anyway. "Have you ever been in love?" The man places his glass down and stares at Will, steel-eyed. The expected reaction, "Once," he responds , the word just a croak from the back of his throat. Will nods. "It's always just once, isn't it? The rest..they're just echoes

Einstein said the way to understand relativity was to imagine the difference between love and pain. "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour.

The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here.

Camus also said, 'If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there'?

No tienes que entender la vida. Tienes que vivirla. Nada más.

We can't tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.

Maybe once you had known fear and love and beauty, you could never unknow them.

The next day I had a hangover. I realised that if getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.

But the trouble with life was that it had to be lived consecutively.

Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

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. I was both on the right and wrong side of history.

Life is strange,' she said. 'How we live it all at once. In a straight line. But really that's not the whole picture. Because life isn't simply made of the things we do, but the things we don't do too. And every moment of our life is a . . . kind of turning.

That is what history is, the teaching and telling of it. It is a way to control it and order it. To turn it into a pet. But history you have lived is different to history you read in a book or on a screen. And some things in the past can't be tamed.

Your life will have 25,000 days in it. Make sure you remember some of them.

On Earth you have to spend a lot of time traveling in between places, be it on roads or on rail tracks or in careers or relationships.

Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married or they don't get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realize they would have done it the same, and then they die.

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.

Memories were just future sadness stored away

Feeling. That is what it is about. People place so much value on thought, but feeling is as essential.

I should also say, in case it needs saying: I don't know for sure that the words I write were the words that were actually spoken. They probably weren't. 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.