Quotes About Experience

One's own family and situation are all one knows as a child. Therefore they are, by default, normal. I thought everyone had a papa who sometimes stayed awake all night writing philosophical papers, only to burn them all in a rage in the morning. It was only when I was old enough to notice that other fathers didn't act like my own that I realized the truth.

Whatever else came tomorrow and for the rest of her life, she would have this moment: this one point in time when she was intimately linked to Maximus. Maximus the man.

My guess is that he remembers some of me, some of us together, and the rest rolled off him like topsoil in a flash flood.

For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you've seen that truth—really seen it—you can't look away.

Old women who live long enough mainly count the bodies, whether we want to or not.

I suppose familiarity erodes even the most awful memories

I had been struck by the excitement of the traveler who looks history in her subtle face.

At first I thought I would study literature. Then, however, I realised I loved true stories even better than imaginary ones.

This corner of history was as real as the tiled floor under our feet or the wooden tabletop under our fingers. The people to whom it had happened had actually lived and breathed and felt and thought and then died, as we did - as we would.

It shouldn't have hurt. She should be used to it by

Books remember all the things you cannot contain.

My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning's the same, the meter's identical. When you read the actual version you can never get it into your head that it's right and you're wrong.

The things that were so bad, that hurt so. If I forget them, if I forget such things still happen, how can I help others? My scars prove that I know myself what others suffer.

I do not want to work. I want to think about what it is they want to do to my brain and think about what it means. It means more than they say; everything they say means more than it says. Beyond the words is the tone; beyond the tone is the context; beyond the context is the unexplored territory of normal socialization, vast and dark as night, lit by the few pinpricks of similar experience, like stars.

And however your life goes, Paksenarrion, it cannot return to past times: you will never be just as you were. What has hurt you will leave scars. But as a tree that is hacked and torn, if it lives, will be the same tree - will be an oak if an oak it was before - so you are still Paksenarrion. All your past is within you, good and bad alike.

Behind them the two cohorts marched along, the novices learning from Cracolyna's veterans how best to keep themselves comfortable in overnight bivouacs. And not to dice with veterans.

They're called cliches because they're true, you know. Besides, life is quite complicated enough...

His lips parted, but long years of experience with Ramses, and to some extent, Emerson, had taught me how to turn a conversation into a monologue.

I should have been grateful to him, and I was—the way I was grateful to my dentist after he had filled a big cavity without anesthesia.

marred by deep lines of

You will have only one story," she had said. "You'll write your one story many ways. Don't ever worry about story. You have only one.

All these lives, she said. All the stories we never know. (125)

A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one.

It was hard work being old. It was like being a baby, in reverse. Every day for an infant means some new little thing learned; every day for the old means some little thing lost. Names slip away, dates mean nothing, sequences become muddled, and faces blurred. Both infancy and age are tiring times.