Quotes About Experience

Becoming a grandmother is wonderful. One moment you're just a mother. The next you are all-wise and prehistoric.

Love gets bigger after forty," Fenton tells me. "After forty,, love says, 'Come one, come all.

Like sometimes when you go to a movie and you get so lost in the story that when you're walking out of the theater you can't remember anything at all about your own life.

Could a person mourn and be joyful simultaneously? I understood it as the challenge of the twenty-first century. Maybe it was simply what being a grown up meant.

what if you could have all the wisdom of a lifetime and still look like you looked when you were twenty-five' 'or what?' I say. 'what, what' she says. I say, 'I thought we were playing Would You Rather...?' She twists her head like a dog at a foghorn. 'Marla,' I say, 'you get the wisdom because you don't anymore look like you did when you were twenty-five.' She says, 'You don't understand the rules to this game.

How to hang on to that full-body joy I knew I was capable of and still understand it as elegy.

but for the rest of my own life, I want to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief without

And even though I knew in my head there's nothing a man can do that a woman can't, I also knew in my heart we can't help doing it for different reasons. And just like a man will never understand exactly how a woman feels when she has a baby, or an orgasm, or the reasons why she'll fight so hard to be loved, a woman can't know in what way a man satisfies himself, what question he answers for himself, when he looks right at death.

How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us. But we have to ask with an open heart, with no idea of what the answer will be.

And once out, Eleanor thought silently, you can't put it back any more than returning a mist of perfume to a bottle once it has been sprayed.

Conversations in French bubble around me like a long-forgotten perfume I am desperate to inhale. Familiar words trickle back, first in a stream then a river, though I've scarcely heard them in half a century.

But the truth was when it came to grief, each person was an island, alone. She'd learned that the hard way. She

Of this he was certain: to be in her presence was to know delight in a more vivid sense than ever he had before.

Life can be cruel and uncomfortable at times. That doesn't define you. It's how we survive and create a colorful life with our experiences. Good and bad.

I don't really feel like I want to chase youth. I want to get old. I want to experience all the seasons of my life.

Killy arched an eyebrow in disbelief. "Don't be thinkin' you can deceive this old man. I've been makin' a fool of myself over women since before you were born.

You were the best time I'd ever had—until you became the worst time I've ever had.

Right next to Thrifty's was an all-girls Catholic school, so we shimmied over the fence to break the liquor law with the Lord. I kept saying I didn't feel anything, but I could hardly get the words out, I was cracking up so hard.

To grow up without risk is to risk not growing up.

You don't say, "I'm sorry,"' he says. 'Getting injections, and experiencing pain, is part of life. There's no reason to apologize for that.' He seems to be channelling Rousseau, who said, 'If by too much care you spare them every kind of discomfort, you are preparing great miseries for them.' (I'm not sure what Rousseau thought about suppositories.)

Never mind having an existential crisis; it's been years since we've even been to the movies.

her, and the sweetness, the passion, exploded inside her a hundred times more brilliant than before as if she'd been living life in two dimensions, two black-and-white dimensions, and

Dark books say to us, "This isn't about you. You are in fact alive and safe." Yes, there's an implicit and unavoidable warning, an edge of danger; these things happen, the books say. And yet, as bad as it gets inside this book, you, the reader, are securely outside. If

My sort wants the book in its entirety. We need to touch it, to examine the weight of its paper and the way text is laid out on the page. People like me open books and inhale the binding, favoring the scents of certain glues over others, breathing them in like incense even as the chemicals poison our brains. We consume them.