Quotes About Experience

You've got to date a lot of Volkswagens before you get to your Porsche.

This is the strangest family vacation ever," Liam said.

Living in the present moment means accepting your experience, moment by moment, without judgment, which takes both practice and positive intention.

It's not prettier or better than other places and it sure a shell isn't an easy place, but I know how to live here. And that counts.

Friends come and go, Lewis, but the things you learn will always be yours, to use as you will.

When you start writing, your incredulity at the childish, incompetent, graceless thing you've done is shattering. One of the advantages of having experience as a writer - and there aren't many, in face I can't think of any other - is that you know you can make the horrible thing better, then you can make it better again, then you can make it better again. And you may not be able to make it good, but at least it's not going to be what you're looking at now.

It's odd—no matter how you feel about a place, it's as though you exchange something with it. It keeps a little bit of you, and you keep a little bit of it." "I know," he said. "And the thing you mostly get to keep is leaving.

Uncle Cor once had asked Vincent if he would feel anything for a woman or a girl who was beautiful, 'but I said I would have more feeling for and would prefer to be involved with one who was ugly or old or impoverished or in some way unhappy, who has acquired understanding and a soul through experience of life and trial and error, or sorrow.' -Vincent Van Gogh

But if there's one thing I've found in all my muddled wanderings, it's that we learn from our misfortunes just as much as from the good things that happen to us.

As much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.

When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense.

I was flesh thirst desire dust blood lips cracking feet blistered knees skinned hips bruised, but I was so happy not to be napping on a sofa under a blanket with an older man by my side and a baby on my lap.

It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world too.

So do you anthropologists study primitive people?' 'Yes, but the only primitive person I have ever studied is myself.

Sometimes, I find myself limping. It's as if my body remembers the way I walk with my mother. Memory is not always reliable. It is not the whole truth. Even I know that.

Sometimes I would sprinkle sea salt on a wedge sour green tomato and dip it into the peppery emerald olive oil. It was as if I had struck on something good that was within my reach.

Deborah Moggach

Evelyn's New Age daughter will discover that a good shag beats hugging a guru any day." — Helen Falconer, book reviewer for The Guardian

Deborah Moggach

And who can speak more authoritatively of what it is like to inhabit the middle ground between biology and culture than gender-variant people? An individual who has inhabited the social roles of both and and woman, with all the cultural baggage that accrues to both states - or to neither- acquires a kind of gender gnosis: a secret knowledge denied the rest of us who live in our assigned boxes, M or F, with really probing the boundaries.

As satisfied as I was that I had accomplished what I had set out to do, I realized that the journey I had resolved to take did not end after the completion of the book. I have learned that each journey begets another one and life has a way of exponentially creating new roads to follow.

People are naturally hardworking but will stop working hard at anything if they learn from experience that their effort makes no difference.

Everything we say to each other echoes with meanings left over from our past experience— both our history talking to the person before us at this moment and our history talking to others. This is especially true in the family— and our history of family talk is like a prism through which all other conversations (and relationships) are refracted.

You're human, and sometimes the vagaries of life are just too delicious to ignore.