Quotes About Experience

No place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the walls of memory.

It was so easy to be wise in the explanation of an experience one has not personally witnessed. ("The Wendigo")

The psychology of places, for some imaginations at least, is very vivid; for the wanderer, especially, camps have their "note" either of welcome or rejection.

Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own. But all these, at one point or another, somewhere link on intimately with human life and human experience.

I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end.

For no man under the sky lives twice

An alert and learned man will take advice from any event.

People in this world are like travelers whose journey is going on though they are asleep. ( Life's journey is going on though men may not feel it ).

Seek help from those who were satiated and then hungry, not from those who were hungry and then satiated.

Whites simply do not experience either what have come to be called the 'micro-aggressions' of everyday racism—habitually being followed by security guards in department stores is one extremely familiar experience; noticing the discomfort of white people in your presence is another

Time travel is real, Daniel said. We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute.

And which comes first? her unbearable mother is saying. What we see or how we see it?

Or perhaps it is just that George has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at.

Somehow this wasn't the same as melancholy. It was something else, about how melancholy and nostalgia weren't relevant in the slightest. Things just happened. Then they were over. Time just passed. Partly it felt unpleasant, to think like that, rude even. Partly it felt good. It was kind of a relief.

All short stories long.

it's the best fish I've ever caught, that fish I didn't catch, cause it's a fish that will always be with me now and never be eaten, it'll never die, that fish I'll never land.

But that's summer for you. Summer's like walking down a road just like this one, heading towards both light and dark. Because summer isn't just a merry tale. Because there's no merry tale without darkness.

Whatever age you are, he says. You still die young.

You've got to use every moment. Because in the blink of an eye it's past you, and you never get your time again. Forgive me, Grace, Charlotte said smiling, but I think that's rubbish. I believe we meet our times with our full and ready selves at whatever ages we are when the times happen to us. That's what it's all about.

Because when I think about what it was like to live with you, it was like all these things. It was like living in a poem or a picture, a story, a piece of music, when I think of it now. It was wonderful.

But pure joy! He'd forgotten what it feels like, to feel. To feel even just the thought of one's own bared self near someone else's beauty.

The Essentials of English, book of choice of the older boys at St. Faith's for spanking the younger boys with, leaving a particular broad-natured pain ever afterwards associated with grammar.

Somehow this wasn't the same as melancholy. It was something else, about how melancholy and nostalgia weren't relevant in the slightest. Things just happened. Then they were over. Time just passed. Partly it felt unpleasant, to think like that, rude even. Partly it felt good. It was kind of a relief.

Imagine if people decided at birth never ever to throw away any of the shoes they wore over the whole course of a life, and had a special cupboard where they kept all these old shoes they'd walked about the world in. What would there be in such a shoe museum, when you opened its doors? Row upon row, perfectly preserved, the exact shapes we took at certain points in our lives? Or row upon row, rack upon rack, of nothing but old soiled leather, old stale smell?