Quotes About Experience

You get older, but you don't ever feel grown up

But it's the temptation of so many suburban-raised children to invent tales of adversity, to create hardscrabble mythologies out of life histories marked by little more than field hockey games and orthodontist appointments.

I accept that people with children are having a deeper, more complex experience of being alive than I am, and this is fine with me. Raising children is one of many life experiences I'm happy to die without having had, like giving birth, going to war, spending a night in jail, or seeing Forrest Gump. If I could get through life without experiencing death, I would gladly do that, too.

Novelty has a way of intensifying memory. The less often you do something, the deeper the memory burrows in.

My not being a father had kept me young, had kept my curiosity awake.

I'd get it wrong anyway; everyone who hasn't lived there thirty years or more gets accused of getting it wrong)

the time I watched a knife fight outside the window of the studio in Greenwich Village, the time I got an HIV test at a Department of Health free clinic in order to prove some kind of point to myself (other than that I didn't have HIV, which I already knew).

The only thing I could do now for which my youth would be a truly notable feature would be to die. If I died now, I'd die young. Everything else, I'm doing middle-aged.

To have a poorly understood disease is to be brought up against every flaw in the U.S. health care system; to collide with the structural problems of a late-capitalist society that values productivity more than health; and to confront the philosophical problem of conveying an experience that lacks an accepted framework.

Onlookers often respond to the experience of chronically ill people by focusing on the supposed positives, presumably because it makes the pain of witness bearable.

I think: it's the holidays. There are parties. I'm young. I've spent the past two years going to oncologists. I'm going to put on my party shoes. And I do go to one party, and I leave when people start to dance around a pole. Later I start dating the man whose party it was, and he remembers being glad I came, and casually tells me how he flirted his head off that night. I'm not in your country, I think. I haven't lived in your country for a while.

My narrative is not a neat one. Which version of the story of my illness I tell depends on what month, what day, even what hour I do so, and whether my symptoms are in the background or the foreground.

To have a poorly understood disease is to be brought up against every flaw in the U.S. health care system; to collide with the structural problems of a late-capitalist society that values productivity more than health; and to confront the philosophical problem of conveying an experience that lacks an accepted framework. Even

Is illness, in any way, a lesson? Illness is a travesty; illness is shit; illness is not redemptive unless it happens to be for a particular ill person, for reasons that are not replicable nor should they be said to be so.

The experiences which drugs induce are as far removed from Reality as is a mirage, from water. No matter how much you pursue the mirage, you will never quench your thirst, and the search for Truth through drugs must end in disillusionment.

All illusion comes and goes, but the soul remains unchanged. What is meant by God-realization is to actually experience this important thing that the soul is eternal.

If drugs could make one realise God, then God is not worthy of being God. No Drugs! Many people in India smoke hashish and ganja, they colours and forms and lights and it makes them elated. But this elevation is only temporary, it is a false experience of illusion, and serves to take one further away from reality.

You are because God is, God is because you are. But that experience one in a million can have.

All men leave the harbour of youth, but only few reach the very far island of wisdom!

Anything easy teaches you nothing! To learn something, have some difficulties!

Be the inner journeys, be the outer travels, all trips elevate man, all voyages lift him up!

Before climbing the summits, you must first walk in the down valleys!

Books get older as well; their body also wears out, but unlike us, their brain remains forever young!

Do not wish an everlasting spring! Without tasting the winter, you cannot get pleasure out of the spring!