Quotes About Experience

Time didn't age you; memory did.

I wouldn't need to be so very different for sun to seem to be about sun, for green to be about green, for joy and boredom and anguish and terror and death to all be themselves, beyond the need for any killing clarity, and then this-- this , the growing rings of light and water and stone--would take up all of me, and be all the words I need.

Life has a way of talking to the future. It's called memory.

But then, everything on Earth was changing him. Every aggressive word from a friend over lunch, every click on his virtual farm, every species he painted, each minute of every online clip, all the stories he read at night and all the ones I told him: there was no "Robin," no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as. The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.

And what do all good stories do? They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels.

We are not born familiar. At best, familiar waits for us down the run of years. Familiar is what he can become to her only through life. But familiar to herself, already, looking on him.

I didn't know how to be a parent. Most of what I did, I remembered from what she used to do. I made enough mistakes on any one day to scar him for life. My only hope was that all the errors somehow canceled each other out.

Yet, soon enough, an afternoon, half an hour, a minute, half a sentence, or half a word all feel the same size. They disappear into the rhythm of no rhythm at all.

And soon enough, she was sold on the fine art of hang gliding above the busy earth.

La nostra vita a U. non somigliava affatto ai nostri ricordi. U. era cambiata in tutto, fuorché nei particolari. (p. 225)

Life's moment is here. A test that it has not yet had.

But he has made her happy in the only place where people really live, the few-second-wide window of Now.

She stands with her nose in the bark, perversely intimate. She doses herself for a long time, like a hospice patient self-administering morphine. Chemicals rush down her windpipe, through the bloodstream to her body's provinces across the blood-brain barrier and into her thoughts. The smell grips her brain stem until she and the dead man are fishing side by side again, under the pine shade where the fish hide, in the soul's innermost national park.

palindrome: La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural.

The people inside these changed lives differ from us only in degree. Each of us has inhabited these baffling islands, if only briefly.

Musicians speak of bliss, but that's just to throw the uninitiated off the scent. There is no bliss; there is only control.

Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing.

People want a better story than they get." The wild-haired sadhu leans forward so fast he almost pitches out of his wheelchair. "Yes! And what do all good stories do?" There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. "They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

The scent retrieves all kinds of things he once knew and reminds him of all those things he never will.

Ao testemunhar o fracasso da medicina perante o meu filho, desenvolvi uma teoria esdrúxula: A vida é algo que temos de parar de corrigir. O meu pequeno era um universo de bolso que eu jamais poderia aspirar a sondar. Cada um de nós é uma experiência, e nem sequer sabemos o que está a experiência a testar. Ninguém é perfeito. Mas, caramba, todos ficamos tão lindamente aquém.

So the arguments progressed across the pleasant Berkeley summer. "We were forever inventing new tricks," Bethe says, "finding ways to calculate, and rejecting most of the tricks on the basis of the calculations. Now I could see at first-hand the tremendous intellectual power of Oppenheimer who was the unquestioned leader of our group. . . . The intellectual experience was unforgettable.

The sweetest sounds I'll ever hear are still inside my head.

This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents. This is my story.