Quotes About Experience

Well, thought Winnie, crossing her arms on the windowsill, she was different. Things had happened to her that were hers alone, and had nothing to do with them. It was the first time. And no amount of telling about it could help them understand or share what she felt. It was satisfying and lonely, both at once.

Novels are longer than life.

Writers live twice. They go along with their regular life, are as fas as anyone in the grocery store, crossing the street, getting dressed for work in the morning. But there's another part of them that they have been training. The one that lives every second at a time. That sits down and sees their life again and goes over it. Looks at the texture and details.

Accept loss forever Be submissive to everything, open, listening No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language, and knowledge Be in love with your life

You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.

When you write a memory, it isn't in the past anyway. It's alive right now.

Begin with "I remember." Write lots of small memories. If you fall into one large memory, write that. Just keep going. Don't be concerned if the memory happened five seconds ago or five years ago.

We learn writing by doing it. That simple. We don't learn by going outside ourselves to authorities we think know about it.

do all my original writing by hand. I have greater mobility: I can write on planes, with friends in cafés. Plus it feels more connected with my body; my hand moves with my arm and shoulder, which is connected to my chest and heart. All good writing comes from the body and is a physical experience.

We have lived! Our moments are important. This is what it is to be a writer: to be the carrier of details that make up history.

Write in different places—for example, in a laundromat, and pick up on the rhythm of the washing machines. Write at bus stops, in cafés. Write what is going on around you.

the artist and the alcoholic have parallel paths. They both go into the darkness, but the alcoholic gets stuck there. The artist (if she is not also addicted) goes into the darkness and is transformed by the experience and comes out more alive.

We learn writing by doing it.

But what if you are already sixty, seventy years old, eighty, ninety? Let the thunder roll. You've got something to say. You are alive and you don't know for how long. (None of us really knows for how long.) No matter your age there is a sense of urgency, to make life immediate and relevant.

In college in the late sixties, I read almost exclusively male writers, usually dead, from England and the rest of Europe. They were very far removed from my daily life, and though I loved them, none of them reflected my experience. I must have subconsciously surmised that writing was not within my ken. It never occurred to me to write, though I secretly wanted to marry a poet.

Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make it so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, or drop a jar of applesauce.

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.

Going to a party, for me, is as much a learning experience as, you know, sitting in a lecture.

Even if you know what's coming, you're never prepared for how it feels.

El amor enloqueció a Norrie. Espero que nunca me pase a mí.

My optimism is not based primarily on the successful march of democracy in recent times but rather is based on the experience of having lived in a fear society and studied the mechanics of tyranny that sustain such a society.

I believe that every role that I have done this far has had quality and content. My roles have been very demanding and every role has been a challenge and a learning experience that has helped me mature as an actress.

Men don't become worth your while until they're in their thirties." … "Well, it's not automatic with all men, you know." … "With women, of course, it's different. Women are born interesting.

The great events in our lives are physical. Childbirth. Sex. Combat. Death. Not poetry, or music, or the thoughts of great men will flash across the transom of our minds at the moment of dying. We will remember only the moments when we felt the fibers of our body sing. Bloodily. Messily. Ecstatically.