Quotes About Experience

Pain was no longer a mystery to him, and a man familiar with pain has entered a new kind of freedom.

This woman he met was the woman he met and however you try, you cannot unmeet.

I asked them: Does it hurt? And the scar people nodded, yes. But it felt somehow wonderful, they said. For one long second, it felt like the world was holding them close.

And because circumstances rarely match, and one afternoon can be a patchwork of both joy and horror, the taste of the soup washed through me

After the incident in the ER, Ino longer wanted to advertise my experience to anyone. You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground. There's a kind of show a kid can do, for a parent – a show of pain, to try to announce something, and in my crying, in the desperate, blabbering, awful mouth-clawing, I had hoped to get something across. Had it come across, any of it? Nope.

I peed, then washed my hands with shampoo. The soap was in the soap dish and looked, at that moment, the size of a piece of soap.

Until that moment, I'd been living in my own little universe of good-luck hell.

Places grow to have meaning in your life from experience, from the process of connecting. The inevitable contemplation of commemorative tattoos follows.

It's a conundrum. "Marketing is too important," said David Packard, cofounder of Hewlett-Packard, "to be left to the marketing people." On the other hand, marketing is too complicated to be left to management people who have little experience in marketing and who don't understand its principles.

The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.

We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one's life. There is an urge to say, 'I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfilment.

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.

Not everything which happens to us occurs with reference to something about us.

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

We had often read the same books at night in the same bed, and later realized that they had touched us in different places: that they had been different books for each of us. Might the same divergence not occur over a single love-line? I felt like a dandelion releasing hundreds of spores into the air - and not knowing if any of them would get through.

To have a sexual history did not only imply one had made love to a succession of people, it also suggested one had either rejected or been rejected by these same bedroom companions.

If we find poetry in the service station and motel, if we are drawn to the airport or train carriage, it is perhaps because, in spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts, in spite of their garish colours and harsh lighting, we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.

A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity, so that new information is as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

Our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.