Quotes About Experience

When you start to "fall down the stairs" there is that moment when you realize that you have no control over what is going on. You simply experience the plunge and see where it takes you.

Some may not believe my account; they may think it was some kind of wish fulfillment during a point of severe trauma. I don't have to defend my experience. I know what happened to me. For those of us whose faith is in the reality of heaven, no amount of evidence is necessary.

In fact, life is our greatest teacher. Whatever we are doing can be instructive, whether we are at the office, or talking to our spouse, or driving a car on the freeway. If we are present to our experiences, the impressions of our activities will be fresh and alive, and we will always learn something new from them. But if we are not present, every moment will be like every other, and nothing of the preciousness of life will touch us.

You know it's only 50 miles from Grand River to Canton, but it took me 67 years to travel that distance.

Kitsch and tourism are inseparable partners. Perhaps it is because, by definition, both are inauthentic.

Juárez is surprisingly cold in the winter, miserably hot in the summer, and you just hope that either spring or autumn falls on a weekend so you get to enjoy it.

As in life itself." Xue Xin chuckled. "Are we its guest, or its prisoner?

You set someone straight, you have to go on the crooked road yourself. Sometimes you get lost.

Old men, he thinks, take their fading pleasures where they can.

I think most observance is really more a way of conceptualizing day-to-day life as what it actually is for many people, a progress of meaningful failures.

The confusing signals, the impurity of the signal, gives you verisimilitude, as when you attend a funeral and notice that it's being poorly done.

the mystery of love bespeaks another mystery—the mystery of God. If we refuse to ascribe the name of God to the mystery of love, we shall remain in the throes of endless self-deception. Which means that melancholia cannot but be deeply, inherently religious. It has its human players and counterplayers, yet, in the end, it always comes down to one's personal experience of the mystery, the uncanniness of love. And there is nothing more uncanny than a love that has no knowable boundaries.

Real life. The greatest interactive fiction of them all.

The older a man gets...the longer it takes for him to get a grin organized.

He was about forty, with the smooth weathered look of a man who keeps himself in shape with handball and self-esteem.

lived in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Do you know just how horrible New Brunswick, New Jersey is?" She smiled faintly, as she shook her head. "No, I don't." "You're lucky. Those who do have experience of New Brunswick, New Jersey are scarred for life.

Well, god damn it," Cayzer said. "Sometimes I don't know if I was stupid all my life or if I'm just getting stupid with old age. Come on along, you can ask them yourself.

Two solid weeks of beautiful weather. Clear sunny days, low humidity, temperature in the seventies, air so brisk and clean you could read E PLURIBUS UNUM on a dime across the street. Clear cloudless nights, temperature in the fifties, the sky a great soft raven's breast, an immense bowl of octopus ink salted with a million hard white crystalline stars and garnished with a huge moon pulsing with white light. It was disgusting.

Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a dream.

I personally don't believe people really grow. They just learn stuff when they were a kid, and hold on to it, and that affects every relationship they have.

But there are no happy endings, because if things are happy they have not ended.

She said that one of the advantages of being ninety was that she could read a detective story again, only two weeks after she first read it, without any notion of which character was the villain.

I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.

Men at forty Learn to close softly The doors to rooms they will not be Coming back to.