Quotes About Experience

Better by far never to have known the pleasure than to have the pain that followed.

Is the girl all right?" "She's had an ordeal but she's young," Augustus said. "She won't forget it, but she might outlive it.

The first difference Newt noticed about being grown up was that time didn't pass as slow.

No, but I have passed the point in life where I expect to be satisfied," Augustus said. "At least I don't expect to be satisfied with much. When it comes right down to it, Woodrow, I guess my own cooking beats anything I've come across in this life.

Even experienced men were apt to flounder badly in crises if they lacked leadership.

Ikey had passed his seventieth year and considered anyone under fifty to be callow, at best.

Show business imposes its own strict temporality: no matter how many CDs or DVDs we own, it would still have been better to have been there, to have seen the living performers in the richness of their being and to have participated, however briefly, in the glory of their performance.

I don't sing about myself. I sing about life. I am happy, but life is sad. The songs don't belong to me . . . They belong to those who hear them.

What would you know about anything, Jasper?" Augustus asked. "Age don't slow a man's whoring. It's lack of income that does that. No more prosperous than you look, I wouldn't think you'd know much about it.

My main skills are talking and cooking biscuits," Augustus said. "And getting drunk on the porch. I've probably slipped a little on the biscuits in the last few days, and I've lost the porch, but I can still talk with the best of them.

There's no one book that would define me; I'd have to name nearly every book that I've read over the past 70 years. Reading has sustained me and has been the one constant throughout my life.

The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour.

He himself had once been a man of firm opinion, but now it seemed to him that he knew almost nothing, whereas the words Clara flung at him were hard as rocks.

Francis Goes to the Army.

None of it was sensible, yet he had to admit there was something about such follies that he liked. The sensible way, which he had pursued once or twice in his life, had always proved boring ... There was much more enterprise in certain follies, it seemed to him.

I've heard of you, McCrae. But I didn't know you was so old." "Oh, I wasn't till lately," Augustus said.

But I ain't young enough to count on what I think bein' right, either, an' I ain't fool enough to figure on things turning out the way I expect 'em to.

There can be secondary and tertiary reasons for wanting a particular book. One is the pleasure of holding the physical book itself: savoring the type, the binding, the book's feel and heft. All these things can be enjoyed apart from literature, which some, but not all, books contain.

recent experience had shown him that men had to use what hope they could muster, to stay alive.

I don't sing about myself," Campo said. "I sing about life. I am happy, but life is sad. The songs don't belong to me." "Well, you sing them, who do they belong to?" Pea asked. "They belong to those who hear them," Po said.

If one stopped to think about it, it was depressing how little most men learned in their lifetimes. Pea Eye was a prime example. Though loyal and able and brave, Pea had never displayed the slightest ability to learn from his experience, though his experience was considerable. Time and again he would walk up on the wrong side of a horse that was known to kick, and then look surprised when he got kicked.

Ain't this been a hell of a time?

Maybe, Gus said. We've had a lot of practice, going on expeditions for nothing. That's how it mostly turned out. You ride awhile in one direction and then you turn around and ride back.

Nothing lasts. You can't do any one thing for two hundred years. A marriage, a career, a hobby—they're good for twenty years, and maybe you go through a phase more than once. I did some experimental medicine. I wrote a big chunk of that documentary on the Trinoc culture that won a—