Quotes About Experience

It takes a lady of a certain age to contain the stuff [whiskey]. Particularly the Irish. No offense but a bit of weathering and experience are required not to go right off the edge with it. I would heisitate to serve Irish to a green schoolgirl. Mixes and vodka are enough for them to go wrong on. I couldn't look at myself shaving if I poured Irish for the young.

It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.

There are days that walk through me and I cannot hold them.

We all learn here by the honorable path of horrible mistakes.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

when I am in a foreign city and feel even the slightest bit disoriented, I can feel the panic of that day on the Hong Kong street begin to rise in my chest. My story of being lost ended quickly and happily, but it still haunts me.

Well, I've never been to a church before. It would be a new experience for me." He went back to work. "You'd hate it." "Why?" "It's boring.

He put down his roll and reached over and took her gnarled hand, stroking the back of it with his thumb. I'm trying to tell the child something only you and I can understand. How good it is to be old. I watched her face go from being startled by his gesture to being pleased that he had somehow joined her side against me. Then she seemed to remember. She drew back her hand. We'll die, she said. Yes, he said. But we'll be ready. The young ones never are.

Listening to that woman was like licking melted ice cream off the carton.

by water is so much nicer than traveling

Away from home.

We shortchange ourselves by regarding religious faith as a matter of intellectual assent. This is a modern aberration; the traditional Christian view is far more holistic, regarding faith as a whole-body experience. Sometimes it is, as W.H. Auden described it, 'a matter of choosing what is difficult all one's days as if it were easy.

this, they've never felt that, they no longer feel anything, they don't count anymore. I think it's small-minded. I wish there were more people over sixty here, to tell you the truth.

How am I still making stupid mistakes in my eighties? Whenever somebody says to me, "Maybe it'll come with age," I want to say, "I wouldn't count on it.

I responded with what seemed an appropriate blend of honey and vinegar, suggesting that wit, like anything else, is rarely found where rarely sought, and that in my experience it was damned uncommon in men as well. Artie beamed; if it was a test, I had passed.

Maybe there's a natural order in all this: New things pop up at the edges, but the middle's where the money is. I did that dance myself over the years. I got rich doing it. And now here I am, an old white lady in a fur coat on a Murray Hill sidewalk, eavesdropping on passersby, wondering what I'm missing.

and my men were in the film to grant it authenticity, yet somehow we were the least convincing thing in it. The whole experience was a pungent reminder—a reminder I didn't need—that in a contest against passion, truth always makes a poor showing.

I didn't believe in love at first sight. In fact, as I would soon be reminded by seemingly every literate person in New York, I had written and published more than a few poems lampooning the very idea of it. But one need not believe in something for it to happen anyway.

No one who'd actually been in the Pocket would believe the explanation, but that didn't matter. We were symbols now, no longer in control of our own stories.

How am I still making stupid mistakes in my eighties? Whenever somebody says to me, Maybe it'll come with age, I want to say, 'I wouldn't count on it.

Whenever somebody says to me, "Maybe it'll come with age," I want to say, "I wouldn't count on it.

wit, like anything else, is rarely found where rarely sought, and that in my experience it was damned uncommon in men as well.

I want to go to a café and sit with you. I want you to order something I've never eaten before and tease me about it. And I want to walk, anywhere, nowhere in particular, and for us to disagree.

The world is defined by smells – not words or shapes or sounds. This is the language that makes sense, that everyone understands.