Quotes About Experience

If you hate it, if you find you have made a mistake, it will still have been a change. As with a holiday, if it ends in your wishing to come home, its aim is accomplished.

The disaster of being old was in not feeling safe to venture anywhere, of seeing freedom put out of reach.

Well, she had had the most wonderful summer; she had got that anyhow tucked away up the sleeve of her memory, and could bring it out and look at it when the days were wet and she felt cold and sick.

the place I was bound for on my latest pilgrimage was filled with living, first-hand memories of all the enchanted years that lie between two and eighteen. How enchanted those years are is made more and more clear to me the older I grow. There has been nothing in the least like them since; and though I have forgotten most of what happened six months ago, every incident, almost every day of those wonderful long years is perfectly distinct in my memory.

Imagine, thought Scrap, having most of one's life at the wrong end. Imagine being old for two or three times as long as being young. Stupid, stupid.

Rose's own experience was that goodness, the state of being good, was only reached with difficulty and pain. It took a long time to get to it; in fact one never did get to it, or, if for a flashing instant one did, it was only for a flashing instant. Desperate perseverance was needed to struggle along its path, and all the way was dotted with doubts.

I can't any longer— I've come to the end-" The end? thought old Mrs. Bott. Which end? There were so many ends to life, and in one's younger years one was always coming to them, and then finding that they weren't ends at all.

It seemed, however, that I had. I didn't want any more, so I got them. And now I am glad, for if, as I had sometimes wished at that time, I could have finished with a consciousness become unbearable, if, in other words, I had then died, I would never have known a great many very beautiful and delightful things. Evidently, then, it is wise not too soon to lose patience with life, but to wait and see what it may have round its next corner. I

When Michael Frere came to see Elizabeth about her autobiography All the Dogs of My Life she found him 'such a boring little man. But it is because we are all growing old, and the bones of our inadequate minds come through the flesh that hid them.' She hadn't always found him boring, and Love, one of her best novels, is largely based on their romance.

A RIPE EXPERIENCE OF GERMAN pillows in country places leads me to urge the intending traveller to be sure to take his own. The native pillows are mere bags, in which feathers may have been once. There is no substance in them at all. They are of a horrid flabbiness. And they have, of course, the common drawback of all public pillows, they are haunted by the nightmares of other people. A pillow, it is true, takes up a great deal of room in one's luggage, but

The account of the face treatment that Catherine had undergone at the hands of a quack was taken from a description given to Elizabeth by Katherine Mansfield, her New Zealand cousin, of her own experience in Paris when she was searching for a cure for consumption. This may have been too tragic a source. If Elizabeth needed copy she had, if Frere is to be believed, her own experience to draw on.

and just loving him with all her simple young heart and entirely believing in him, had made him, so completely commonplace before in all his utterances, suddenly—at least in the pulpit—sing. Was it acute, personal experience that one needed? Did one only cry out the truth really movingly when under some sort of lash, either of grief or ecstasy?

I would have all couples neatly paired in years, the forties with the forties, and the twenties with the twenties. Should the forties, as sometimes happens, not care about other forties, and wish to frequent twenties, in their own interests they should be discouraged, and equally those twenties should be discouraged who, with the inexperience of their age, suppose they could be lastingly happy with forties. Fortunately

Taking a hypersensitive approach to life had come to seem so much more pure and honest then joining the ranks of the numb masses who could let it all slide by. What I stopped realizing was that if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all. Everything registers at the same decibel...

Nothing in my life ever seemed to fade away or take its rightful place among the pantheon of experiences that constituted my eighteen years. It was all still with me, the storage space in my brain crammed with vivid memories, packed and piled like photographs and old dresses in my grandmother's bureau. I wasn't just the madwoman in the attic — I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.

Good and bad are not opposites, they are both just different forms of intensity.

Age is a terrible avenger. The lessons of life you give so much to work with, but by the time you've got all this great wisdom, you don't get to be young anymore.

At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24.

motherhood must be like that. it is probably the only experience most women ever have of ownership and domination.

My improved affect did not in any way sway me from the philosophical conviction that life, at its height and at its depth, basically sucks.

Everyone has the right to tell the truth about her own life.

You can look at my life and say there've been some real tragedies, and there have been. But there've also been some exquisitely beautiful times. To me, those far outweigh the others.

Books, the books that I loved above all else to spend my time with, were the great tools for understanding one's life and the lives of other people.

Here I am, in a lovely hotel room, with my own bathroom. I have never experienced such incredible luxury.