Quotes About Experience

I have been a lot of places in my time, and done a lot of things. And there is a sense of Prodigal about my life that begs to be resolved. But one truth anyone reading these pieces ought to get is the sense of movement--the struggle, in myself, to understand where and who I am, and to move with that understanding.

And later in school I developed an interior life that was split obviously like the exterior life. One half-tied to Dey Street while we still lived there and the black life of the playground and streets. And the other tied to the school experiences of McKinley and Barringer. It must be true, maybe obvious, that the schizophrenic tenor of some of my life gets fueled from these initial sources (and farther back with words whispered into the little boy's ear, from mouths and radios).

Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason.

History is not the annals; it's what happens around us when we're unaware it's history.

Blasphemy is a religious experience.

History was what had happened; class was something you read about in a book.

All the world of experience, including matter, is the material manifestation of transcendent forms of consciousness.

A map is not the territory and is not as interesting as the territory.

what does the computer know of the comforting weight of a book in one's lap? Or of the excitement that comes from finding a set of books, dusty and tucked away in the back corner of some store? The computer can only reproduce the information in a book, and never the joyful experience of reading it.

There can be funny moments during sad stories

Every mistake is a lesson

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.

One's life should be sufficiently interesting to furnish entertainment in the record.

Wherever comes man comes tragedy and comedy also.

Observation more than books and experience more than persons, are the prime educators.

Our dreams drench us in senses, and senses steps us again in dreams.

Our bravest and best lessons are not learned through success, but through misadventure..

The history of books shows the humblest origin of some of the most valued, wrought as these were out of obscure materials by persons whose names thereafter became illustrious. The thumbed volumes, now so precious to thousands, were compiled from personal experiences and owe their interest to touches of inspiration of which the writer was less author than amanuensis, himself the voiced word of life for all times.

I wasn't a very good teacher.

The best way to know the soul of another country is to read its literature.

I now believe that all journeys are ridiculous: the only journey from which you don't always come back empty-handed is the journey inside yourself.

When we traveled for two and half days, we reached the Deads' road from which dead babies drove us, and when we reached there, we could not travel on it because of fearful dead babies, etc. which were still on it.

Fewer longtermers means more rookies. In the 103rd Congress (1993–1995), one of the highest turnover periods, 11 of 19 House Intelligence Committee members and 7 of 17 Senate Intelligence Committee members were serving for the first time.

Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.