Quotes About Experience

our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood.

That's how New York looked: like a gorgeous, easy thing to have, even for me.

If we human beings are information processing machines, reading X's & O's and translating that information into what people oh so breathlessly call "experience", & if I had not only the information but the artistry to shape that information using the computer inside my brain, then, technically speaking, was I not having all the same experiences those other people were having?

He's rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earphones to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes. Occasionally he'll hand the device to Mindy, wanting her opinion, and each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums - hers alone - is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were looking back on this lark in Africa with Lou from some distant future.

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

We work in the realm of the impression." Nell hailed a taxi and directed the driver to East

each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums—hers alone—is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage

Here we've been thinking we had nothing in common beyond where we happen to be, and all this time we've been doing the same thing: picking up ghosts.

Coming home in the almost dark made him feel grown up--a taste of grown-up life. Looking back, that seemed like one of the best parts of being a kid.

Cooper would never tell Arthur Berringer anything he didn't know, whereas Dexter saw and knew things the old man couldn't afford to, without personal compromise. He was nearer the earth, its salts and minerals, than any Berringer had been in several generations.

there are so many things that can take a person somewhere else, but none of those things ever happened to me

We all got into it, cracking walnut shells with our shoes, pulling the sweet white meat from inside while a crowd of our Chinese hosts eyed us with bemused perplexity. "Americans," I imagined them saying, afterward. "The poor sons of bitches have everything in the world, but they've never tasted fresh walnuts.

In a mere twenty minutes, they'd blown past the desired point of meaningful-connection-through-shared-experience into the less appealing state of knowing-each-other-too-well.

because at that point, the point at which my acceleration began to reverse, time started running together—there was no more arc of ascension by which to measure it.

Dennis sold vintage weed: Humboldt Homegrown, Eureka Gold, weed from back in the day when marijuana was leafy and harsh and full of seeds but delivered a high that was the weed equivalent of vinyl: "whorled" and "crosshatched," "sonorous" and "plump" (Dennis's MFA in poetry served him well in these marketing descriptions)—in other words, authentic in ways that the bloodless, odorless tinctures that passed for weed nowadays were not.

one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.

I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. "You grew up, Alex," he said, "just like the rest of us.

They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. "I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. "You grew up, Alex," he said, "just like the rest of us.

I've led a sheltered, virtuous life," she said.

We work in the realm of the impression.

Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn't expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

Briefly, I was a journalist in my twenties, although not a very good one. I didn't quite grasp the whole concept of accuracy.

If you've never experienced a sense of dysphoria with your own body, all I can say is, Lucky you. But just because you have not experienced this yourself does not mean it is not real in the hearts of others.